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Fred BiacsiFlag for United States of America

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Upgrade to a Solid State Hard drive...should I?

I have a Dell T5500 Precision that I use for CAD station that has the below listed specs. The question I have is will I gain enough in performance to upgrade this machine to a solid state hard drive, or I am just better off buying a new workstation.  Is this machine worth investing the money into?  If so, what are my options for a SSD that are compatible with this machine?

Dell Inc. Precision WorkStation T5500
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5530 @ 2.40GHz
Number of processor cores 4
Windows 7 Professional 64bit
12.0 GB RAM
Total size of hard disk(s) 466 GB
Display adapter type NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800
  Total available graphics memory 4095 MB
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rindi
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An SSD will give you a major performance boost even with low end hardware, which I don't regard yours to be. So sure, get an SSD.
Looks like a pretty good machine to me, an SSD should help and it'd be a shame to dump that machine if it's still doing the job for the most part.

One of the things I've see is SSD drive just getting jam packed and the machine going to hell cause the C: drive fills up too fast.

so a good thing is to make symbolic links for all except a LocalAdmin account, as you may need an account to run updates (been seeing this in Windows8, but it's a possible issue in 7 also, I just haven't run across it.)

if your using apps that have a really heavy disk use only link the data folders.  as all the swap and temp files should be on the SSD unless it's so much it fills the drive.

I've seen several people with SSD drives end up with only minor improved performance due to size and or swapping to the standard HDD
I would invest the money on an SSD. The configuration on this machine looks quite good. I don't see any reason to invest on a new machine.
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Gary Case
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Member_2_231077

Certainly a performance workstation, you could also up the RAM to 48GB to avoid any memory paging.
you can use this tool for moving your OS to the SSD, if you don't want a fresh install (which is always the best)
Paragon move OS to SSD :  http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/migrate-OS-to-SSD/

at even not 20$ it is very affordeable