[ale] upgrading desktop

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 12:16:13 -0400
Bob via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:


> 
> 1)  Memory.  Currently, there are  two 4 GB ddr3 1600 memory modules
> in the two memory slots.

8GB is enough in 2020, and installing 16 would require you remove
(waste) the 8GB you have now. The computer's 8 years old: You can't
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I'd recommend against a memory
upgrade unless it were less than $100 and sure to work.


> 
> 2)  ssd.  This seems more complicated.
> 
> There are 4 empty pci express slots---one is x16 and the others x1.
> I do not believe that the motherboard supports pcie ssd.  The
> motherboard does not have mSATA or m.2 slots.  So pcie ssd seems to
> be impossible. (I don't know what I'd ever use these slots for.)
> 
> The chipset on the motherboard only supports SATA at 3.0 gb/s.  

That's a shame, as it might bottleneck your speedy new SSD. I'd
recommend you get a dirt cheap (under $50) 256GB SSD, plug it into your
3gb/s SATA, and see if it improves speeds. If not, later, at your
leisure, you can purchase a gb/s pcie SATA slot.

> There 
> are 3 SATA ports and one e-SATA port.  (There has been no update to
> the bios/uefi firmware.)
> 
> One SATA port is connected to the optical drive, and the other two
> SATA ports are connected to the two 1TB HDDs Both drives have plenty
> of free space.

"Plenty" is a relative term. If you can move the data from one to the
other, and have the moved-to drive still have "plenty" of room, do that
and then plug in the SSD into the evacuated SATA port.

If putting all the data on one "spinning rust" drives makes things
tight, I'd recommend buying a big, honking, high quality drive like the
following:

https://www.newegg.com/gold-wd6002fryz-6tb/p/N82E16822235058

You can justify that $230 you spend because you can use this drive in
your next computer, and probably the one after that. It's 7200 RPM for
faster access. You can get a 4TB version for $140 if that's more suited
to your budget. Please remember that with either of these drives,
you'll need to format it GUID in order to get full space. I'm pretty
sure an 8 year old computer can deal with GUID formatted disks, but
make sure.

Don't worry about whether your computer can handle the UEFI boot that
goes hand in hand with GUID formatting, because your boot drive will be
the SSD, partitioned as the root drive (/). You can mount /home and
other things that do heavy writing from the huge spinning rust drive.

An 8 year old computer with 8GB of RAM should be very efficient for you
the next one to four years if you use a lightweight window manager
(OpenBox, IceWM, WindowMaker, jwm and the like) and go light on your
use of piggy browsers like Firefox and Chromium.

Don't forget to use fstrim on your SSD (fstrim /) at least once a week
to keep the SSD running smoothly.

The desktop on which I'm writing this is similar to yours: 6 years old,
dual core, 16GB RAM, root partition on the SSD with almost everything
else mounted from spinning rust, an OpenBox window manager enhanced
with Suckless Tools dmenu software (Free Software). If it weren't for
today's bloaty browsers, I could keep using this computer for another 5
to 10 years before noticing that it slows me down. I think the real
trick is to close browser tabs the second you're done with them: Don't
let them accumulate.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques