Dumpster Diving 27" iMac Upgrade

[EEVblog]

Dave upgrades the hard drive in his 27" 2010 iMac to an SSD

[Brumby]

I put a 250GB SSD into one of those HP Compaq Pro machines I recently got off you and loaded it up with Win 7 (because I have an available licence - and because Win 7 works).

It boots to login screen in 17 seconds.

That's a win!

[Ranayna]

I agree. An SSD is by far the best and most noticable upgrade you can make for *any* computer that still uses spinning rust as a main drive, regardless of whatever OS may be installed.
Though anything older than Windows 7 might degrade the lifetime of an SSD, since TRIM support is quite important.

Mind you, HDDs still have their place. SSDs larger than one or two Terabytes are in my opinion still too expensive to be used as bulk storage, and not everything actually needs the performance of an SSD.

[drussell]

Though anything older than Windows 7 might degrade the lifetime of an SSD, since TRIM support is quite important.

You can just run a TRIM-free-space utility periodically on 3-6 (NT/2K/XP/Vista) anyway, which is fine for most applications still being done on older OSes, though it is not obviously quite as good as having proper TRIM-on-delete support. 

It's even not a bad thing to do every once in a while on recent versions if you're doing system maintenance and clean-up anyway.  Delete all temporary files, bogus logs, old system restore or downloaded updates, etc. then turn off your pagefile (shouldn't be running a pagefile on a SSD anyway!) and hibernation file, etc. then TRIM.