Advice PC upgrade time

[Madmaxx]

So I'm thinking of upgrading my pc ready for next year of uni wanting it to be generally faster especially since I'll be working more on web development, programming and databases; I've been looking at SSDs recently since I don't even fill up 500GB on the HDD right now even with games, movies, music and work/Ubuntu installed.

What are peoples opinions on this? maybe add some more RAM to ?

I currently have:

CPU: AMD Athlon™ II X4 640 Quad-Core CPU

MOTHERBOARD: GigaByte GA-770T-D3L AMD 770 Chipset Support DDR3 Ultra Durable™3
Socket AM3 ATX Mainboard w/ 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, USB2.0, SATA-II, RAID, 1 Gen2
PCIe 16x, 3 PCIe X1, & 2 PCI

MEMORY: 4GB (2x2GB) PC10666 DDR3/1333mhz Dual Channel Memory

VIDEO: ATI Radeon HD 5770 PCI-E 16X 1GB DDR5 Video Card

HDD: 1TB (500GBx2) SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache HDD

POWERSUPPLY: 600 Watts Power Supply

 

[TdC]

Mate imo your largest possible win will be an SSD. It's not the volume it's the IOps and near-instant access an SSD gives you. Also, you can take your SSD in to newer hardware builds so your future proofing is there. Stick your OS (Ubuntu yeah?) on the SSD and set up your disks as a mirror so you have local redundancy. Linux has a Dropbox client, so grab a sub off them with your student email to get some extra hundred MB's worth of space and install the client for cloud backup. Sorted tbh.

Another thing you could consider if you're up for that is to also get a USB3 card and a portable disk like a LaCie Rikki usb3 disk. I have two 1TB Rikki's, each attached to a separate port on a USB3 card I have in my server and that works well for testing stuffs.

 

[Madmaxx]

Ah I meant I use windows 7 right now but dual booted Ubuntu to try out the different OS etc, I'll start looking properly at SSDs now since I've looked at more sources for PC upgrades; only thing I've seen that I don't know much about SATA ll and SATA lll SSDs s my motherboard above says SATA ll is that slower or anything ?

 

[caLLous]

I would use a Virtualbox VM to test a different OS rather than a dual-boot. Dual-booting unnecessarily complicates things if it's just for testing (unless you need access to low-level things that a basic VM can't provide).

 

[MYstIC G]

Dropbox != backup

BAD @TdC

 

[TdC]