Over the years, the best dollar-for-dollar upgrade you can make to an old machine to dramatically improve its performance has fluctuated, and even today, it’s true that slapping some more RAM or a new GPU into your machine should result in a sizable performance boost. At this point, though, almost all aspects of your average computer are blindingly fast enough to complete most tasks. The bottleneck on many computers has increasingly become the read/write speeds of their hard drives.
Upgrading to an SSD drive, then, can be one of the most dramatic performance boosts you can give ailing hardware. Look at Apple’s MacBook Airs, which are blisteringly fast, even though the CPU, GPU and RAM are relatively wimpy. The problem with SSDs, though, are that they are not only expensive, but they come in relatively small capacities.
Intel’s latest SSD range, the 25nm-based 320 series, aims to change both deficiencies of the SSD format. Replacing the X25-M series of SSDs, the 320 Series not only ups storage capacity, but slashes prices by up to $100 per drive.
Available in 40, 80, 120, 160, 300 and 600GB capacities, Intel’s third-gen 320 Series SSDs double sequential write speeds over their predecessors, offering up to 220 MB/s sequential writes and up to 270 MB/s sequential reads.
The 320 Series of SSD is positioned below Intel’s SSD 510 series and uses a 3Gbps SATA II interface instead of a 6Gbps SATA III interface. If you can live with that, though, the 320 Series is worth considering to give some new life to an old machine, especially at these asking prices: 40GB at $89; 80GB at $159; 120GB at $209; 160GB at $289; 300GB at $529 and 600GB at $1,069.
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