Kingston SSD $39.99
RDL2004
Posts: 2,554
Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GB drives only $39.99
Includes "free shipping"
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721107
There's no telling how long this price will last or if it can go even lower.
I already have a bunch of these in service but I'm ordering more today just to give away as Christmas presents.
Includes "free shipping"
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721107
There's no telling how long this price will last or if it can go even lower.
I already have a bunch of these in service but I'm ordering more today just to give away as Christmas presents.
Comments
-Phil
The real worry on these is write life and how it fails.
Cheap SSD drives are worth it, just plan on 2 years, and monitor it. They work, until they don't, and you often get very little warning.
This laptop is not designed for user servicing, though. It's totally sealed on the bottom, there are no access hatches to add/change memory or the SSD. And get this: even the battery is built-in. You can't remove it.
They claim 7-hour battery life, it might be close to that. Very nice little unit for simple needs: internet, email, streaming video, and of course, programming microcontrollers.
In case that's not the right model, pluggable types would be 2.5" SATA drive, mSATA card, or M2 card.
I even have my wife's cell phone running Win10, and it has but a mere 8GB.
@abecedarian: You had far better results than I did. The Win10 Threshold2 update bricked this 32GB laptop, the Office Depot wizards couldn't revive it and gave me a new one, so I'm a little Win-shy. I've turned off automatic updates until I hear from Toshiba about what went wrong.
To my way of thinking, it's an obscene waste of memory when a brand new 32GB SSD computer (no programs installed) couldn't download and install an update without having a 16GB USB stick installed. Then bricks itself after 6 hours of futile downloading/installing.
I alluded to it previously, that Win8/8.1 uses "WIMBOOT", which is a compressed system directory, if you will, and updates are overlain on that. It posed a problem for early Win10 releases, but that's supposedly been resolved with the November update to Win10. The closest I came to being "bricked" was my fault for not having created recovery media out of the box and instead had to rely on Toshiba shipping the USB recovery stick to me. And even then, it wasn't required- I wanted it "just in case."
Thanks for the heads up, Rick. I have about a dozen of these in service myself. While I have a couple of spares, it'll be good to stock up for the next line build.
If you have an account and they know your e-mail address they should notify you anytime an item on one of your wishlists goes on sale. So just make a "wishlist" with that item on it. I've seen them on sale for that price several times.
Just got it today and am impressed so far.
https://www.sandisk.com/home/ssd/extreme-500-ssd
Storage: 240 GB
Read Speed: up to 415 MB/S
Write Speed: up to 340 MB/S
Interface: USB 3.0
Why not be comfortable with an SSD hosting your OS ?
Putting the OS on to SSD is the single most cost effective and dramatic upgrade I have ever made to PC's. Far outstripping processor swaps, floating point processor additions (back in the 386 days), graphics card changes. Just so much quicker than spinning disks.
The OS is not changing all the time so less concern about exceeding FLASH write limits.
I'm breaking that rule on a half terabyte one I got. It's fast, and I've used it really hard. This will be year four. It's got a streaming cloud backup and I've cloned the OS.
Now it works, until it doesnt. Wonder how long? :]
If heard of SSD drives failing in dramatic fashion - sort of all or nothing. Disk drives can too but often they fail more gradually as bad sectors get walled off and the data moved to other areas of the disk.
Maybe my fears are based on early issues - I need to study the subject more.
Here is an interesting article discussing SSD vs. HDD: Performance and Reliability:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/ssd-vs.-hdd-performance-and-reliability-1.html
I've nearly always gotten data recovered from hard disks. Sometimes a lot of work, but of you do the work, you get the data.
I'm in agreement on the fail hard being an attribute of an SSD.
So, I just, with this one exception to get another experience, consider them timed storage. Run em, clone em, and continue. Two to three years. I do big stuff on mine, and that's the interesting bit. For big VM images and other datasets, they are very fast. Love that. But, doing that stuff means tons of writes too. My SSD burn rate is higher than average. A few industry peers are the same way, and we all just run em and stop when the next great deal comes along.
The one I have right now is really big and supposedly really overprovisioned. Got it for a song.
No matter what I've done, it says "healthy" And it has been almost 4 years. Others have given a wear indication. What I want to know is how much over provisioning can matter.
So, I'm actually curious. I'm gonna run it, until it dies. Could be years more, could be next week.
Even with that unknown, I won't go back to a physical disk again. The SSD is just too good.
The things are like crack for computer geeks. First hit is cheap, then you get hooked!
You will never look back. And nothing beats good backup practices irrespective of what you are using.
Now I just assume that anything and everything can totally fail at any time. It's all disposable, the storage, the OS, heck the entire machine. Just now it's unlikely that such a drive failure stops me for more than an our or so as I slap in a replacement and re-image the OS.
It helps that the speed of SSD makes replication and backup much quicker. It helps that anything important is replicated around the world, in github, bitbucket, dropbox, Amazon cloud instances...
Admittedly failure of a laptop whilst travelling might be more troublesome...
I may have to try an SSD since the prices are coming down.
I checked out the current draw on that new SanDisk portable SSD USB drive with one of those USB Charge Doctor units. It draws .14A.
I was even able to use it on a LG 8" tablet I got recently - the tablet has a full size USB port in addition to the microsd charging/data port.
BTW, I have lost data on a moving disk during travel. Couple of times. The SSD is great for that reason alone. When I put my laptop on passive cooling, no moving parts.
Purchased a couple of dozen WD HDDs over the year's, every new computer gets at least three, only had two failures and both were catastrophic, no warning. WD covered one in warranty. What ever happen to RAID?
Don't know if Windows or the SSD firmware prevents it, but it makes sense that an SSD should not be defragmented. Defragmenting a hard drive involves a lot of reading and writing blocks of data, and writing to an SSD is what wears it out.
Defragmenting a mechanical hard drive is done to reduce the need for time consuming head movement by making the file contiguous. An SSD only needs to update a memory address, which takes nanoseconds whether you are reading or writing the next block of data or a block anywhere else on the SSD.
On the other hand, why do a defrag at all?
defrag is all about collecting files into contiguous blocks ready for high speed reading by hard drives. The idea is to minimize track and sector seek time. I.e waiting for the heads to move and the disk to spin round.
An SSD has none of that so there is no point in defrag.
I'm sure the SSD has no idea if your OS is doing a defrag. All it knows about is blocks. You could be using Linux for all it knows.
Does Windows prevent defrag on SSD? I have no idea. Last time I saw defrag happening it was something you had to do intentionally, on MS-DOS I think it was. Proper OS don't need that.
That's just how this hoarder started.
But as we all know, tech products only get cheaper and faster with more memory. Just wait for the next sale.
Don't be the last guy to stock up on killer deals on VHS tapes and 56K modems.