I took a friend to Microcenter. His first time there so he went ape-shit kid in a candy store, managing to buy over $1000 worth of tools, parts and things to wire up his house for networking several PCs and Macs in his home. But while I there I picked up a few things, including a $60 laptop (see below for link), and several SSDs they were literally selling for cheap as “Damaged goods.”
Apparently a case of SSDs were dropped in the warehouse and all the SSD packages inside all had a dented corner, but (according to the 3 I bought), that was the extent of the damage. The plastic that held the unit in place held up and protected the device as it was designed too. These were 128GB SSD made by Inland, which is a store brand and makes many things like tools, electronic parts, 3D Printer Filament, etc. I have bought these SSDs before and still use them to these days inside a couple laptops. I bought these to try out on the Mac Minis that I have.
The Mac Minis are Intel Based Core2Dou CPU based units, 2GB of RAM max, and when released has 80GB hard drives in them. I upgraded a couple of them with a 100GB hard drive years ago, and use these units for my 3D Rendering and CAD Programs. Though they run great for this task, once in a while the hard drive chokes and slows down the system with its swapping of files and memory. The system also ran hot at times, even under Sleep Mode.
Issues I had was cloning the Hard Drive to the SSD through a USB Connector as the USB is slow on these Macs compared to a modern PC. Formatting the SSD took an hour to do (I format the drives while Zeroing out all the data on it, which leaves clean sectors and maps out bad areas to be ignored). Cloning the information from the hard drive to the SSD also took another hour due to the slow data speed of the USB), which was only about 45GB of system files, programs and data.
When done, the SSD was switched over to the Mac Mini and though there were a few minor issues with loose connectors and not the drive itself, the Mac Mini turned on normally. It was low to boot and get to desktop. This is a Mac issue as things have to “fall into place” and one has to make some minor adjustments to the preferences. After a few tweaks in the system preferences and a couple of reboots, the Mac Mini booted up in about 30 seconds; when it usually takes 2 or more minutes with the hard drive. Applications load up in a few seconds, especially the program HomeSweethome3D which has to load and activate Java before it can go load and run the program itself. Data files of one of the houses I designed on the program takes about 30 seconds, when it normally took minutes to do. And lastly, grabbing and moving the house/building and moving it about in its constructed universe and view separate layers has no lag or waiting for the hard drive to swap information. With the hard drive there was a momentary lag before things move according to what you tell the program to do.
Finally, the one machine completed (the other two are waiting for their transplants) is running a lot cooler, when it used to run hot. These are similar in the findings when I put CF cards and SSDs into laptops, they ran faster and cooler. These were G4 Macintosh Laptops and PC Laptops: Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads, Toshiba Satellites and Dell Latitudes/Inspirions.
These “Damaged Goods” 128GB SSD sold for $17 a piece instead of their $45 per unit. Thing is these are not sold online. You have to go to the actual store and see if they have any that got damaged and pick them up. I’ll be looking for more of them when I go there. Oddly enough, some are being used as “new” on my store’s website. Maybe they are new, but the ones I got the boxes has damage to one of the corners. See link below.
Inland 128GB SATA SSD at Brooklyn Microcenter:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/623040/inland-professional-128gb-ssd-3d-tlc-
nand-sata-30-6-gbps-25-inch-7mm-internal-solid-state-drive $60 Laptop Link:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/649971/evolve-iii-maestro-116-laptop-compute
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Cheap SSD Upgrades on a Mac Mini? (Read 90 times)
