Upgrade you can "feel".

[sophisticles]

There are not many computer upgrades that you can really "feel" in normal day to day use; most upgrades such as a faster cpu, faster video card and faster/more ram are only really "felt" when using an app that is bottlenecked by said hardware.

Hard drives are one place where it's commonly accepted that on can "feel" a difference from faster hardware, with SSD's being a very common recommendation when one wants to breath new life into an older computer.

But what if you already have a reasonably fast PC, such as a Haswell based Xeon, 16gb ram, AMD R7 265 and a 960gb San Disk Ultra II SSD? Is there any upgrade you can do that will add noticeable speed in day to day use?

It turns out that the answer is yes and it will only cost $50.

I went to Microcenter to pickup up 2 Toshiba X300 5tb hard drives (a steal at $145 each) and was about to leave when I saw something that piqued my interest.

It's called the Velocity Solo X1 Desktop SSD Upgrade Kit and to be perfectly honest I thought it had to be a ripoff. The packaging seems to make some over the top performance claims, says it's bootable in both PC and Macs and and basically it's a PCI-E adapter board that lets you take a regular SSD and run it from the PCI-E slot, the packaging claims you just plug in your current SSD that you boot from and your PC is now supercharged.

I really thought it would be a bunch of crap, I thought I would have to reinstall the OS or that it wouldn't work with Linux or that it wouldn't be bootable but I decided to give it a shot anyway.

All I did was take my boot SSD, plug it into the board, plug the board into a free PCI-E slot and hit the power button, To my surprise I didn't even have to go into the UEFI to change the boot order or priority, my motherboard saw the PCI-E card, and booted Linux Mint 18 right from it.

Even more surprising is that while it doesn't "supercharge" the system it certainly did add a speed boost to everyday tasks, such as opening a previous browser session with dozens of tabs or copying lots of files from one hard drive to another. Launching apps, such as Libre Office is also noticeably faster.

I know this whole post may sound like a shill, but I just thought that I would let you guys know about this silly $50 upgrade that should be considered if you have a system that's not quite ready for a replacement but also may not offer the zip you want.

[SameSelf]

Too many nodes or comp layers and my 'puter grinds to a halt (some gpu intensive effects don't even need my help). I have to make regular use of proxies and fortunately, I don't edit much 4K content, or my problems would be much worse. But what I describe is admittedly a very bespoke use case, so I agree. There just aren't many computing tasks these days that are cpu bound thus benefiting from an upgrade to Skylake. I had a very informative thread about this a while ago, but it attracted too much trolling and the mods killed it off. But moving off SATA to nvme pcie is the best thing to happen to 'puters since the ssd, beating out DDR4, W10, and Skylake by a mile even if this product is a bit of a frankenstein. I would think it would still be limited by the SATA controller on the ssd, so it surprises me that you see a difference.