Bargains - not CDs!

[Parry1912]

20% off a range of items on ebay (DIY, appliances, etc). But only until 6pm!

[Dave2002]

Amazon have some music magazines - Kindle versions - today (20th September) for £10 for a subscription for a year. There's a 30 day free trial before the charges kick in. May not be to everyone's taste. Look for today's deals.

[Bryn]

Having fairly recently bought some 120GB SSDs to upgrade old laptops, I am not in the market for this one, but MyMemory is currently offering a 240GB SSD for under £28.

[Dave2002]

Having fairly recently bought some 120GB SSDs to upgrade old laptops, I am not in the market for this one, but MyMemory is currently offering a 240GB SSD for under £28.

Interesting, but perhaps not enough. SSDs seem currently to be running at about £66 for a 500 Gbyte unit, and that seems a more convenient size, though it will depend on the user how these things will be used. Also the price of an enclosure is typically about £8, assuming that the SSDs are going to be used externally.

[Bryn]

I was thinking in terms of a replacement for the C: hard drive. I am quite happy with USB memory sticks and hard drives for external storage. They have definitely dropped in price recently.

[Dave2002]

I was thinking in terms of a replacement for the C: hard drive. I am quite happy with USB memory sticks and hard drives for external storage. They have definitely dropped in price recently.

We only have a couple of old computers which might work with such SSDs, and I really don’t think it’s worth attempting to resurrect them. One was good in its time, the other slightly less so.

if it were possible to use a larger SSD with my MacBook Pro I’d do it, but Apple chose to use a less standard format for the internal SSD. I think there’s a firm which supplies a kit, and maybe offers a memory replacement service, but it’s quite expensive.

SSDs in USB 3 enclosures work quite well. Unfortunately there aren’t any really good affordable FireWire enclosures which might work with older iMacs to give an improvement over USB 2.

[Bryn]

When I say "old", none are earlier than i3 based. One has been my main workhorse for a good many years and has the advantage of a Blu-ray compatible optical disc drive but needs a good clear-out of unused software packages, a thorough defragging and then cloning to one of the 120GB SSDs to restore it to some sort of speed of operation. The current C: drive is only a 320GB, so is only used for decidedly short-term data storage before transfer to external drives. There is nothing I can do regarding the tiny ACER Aspire One Cloudbook 11 that I carry about as a sort of tablet plus. The C: drive on that is a 32 GB eMMC, soldered into the motherboard, so no possibility of upgrading to SSD. At least I can now instal Windows 10 updates since Microsoft introduced that ability to use a USB memory stick as part of the process.

[Dave2002]

If you've got USB 3 sockets, then putting an SSD in an enclosure is quite a good way to back off files - faster and safer than using a hard drive. I lost one portable hard drive because it was attached to my laptop, then fell off. The wire "saved" it, but it banged into something on the way down, and never worked again. SSDs don't have that problem. However it's not so worthwhile if your computers only have USB 2 interfaces, as even a hard drive is usually fast enough. I use USB memory sticks as well, but I think for large volumes of data SSDs are better - though larger. I have some memory sticks up to 128 Gbyte, but they tend to get hot. Some memory sticks are also quite slow, which isn't I think a problem with most SSDs.

[Dave2002]

Just looking at the prices of some USB sticks I bought recently, 240 Gbytes equivalent would have cost around or more than £40, so if the 240 Gbyte SSD can be put in a case for under a tenner (it can) then that's not really a bad deal at all. I'm slightly tempted, though I'm not sure if the size is really right for me. It might work for others. Really depends what one wants one for - mass storage, cheap storage, robustness or speed.

[Dave2002]

There is also this SSD - possibly slightly better - at the same price - https://www.mymemory.co.uk/integral-...2-b459eda9518c

This is a ‘P’ version, rather than a ‘V’ version.

Looks similar but slightly faster read and write speeds.

On amazon uk a number of people have reported failures with Integral SSDs, but they may just have been unlucky.
I was surprised to find that Integral appears to be based in Belarus.

https://integral.by/en

[Bryn]

There is also this SSD - possibly slightly better - at the same price - https://www.mymemory.co.uk/integral-...2-b459eda9518c

This is a ‘P’ version, rather than a ‘V’ version.

Looks similar but slightly faster read and write speeds.

On amazon uk a number of people have reported failures with Integral SSDs, but they may just have been unlucky.
I was surprised to find that Integral appears to be based in Belarus.
https://integral.by/en

I note that Integral responded with offers of assistance re. the 2 older one-star reviews (a bit early for them to respond to the most recent). Did the users make the mistake of treating their SSD like a hard drive, defragging it, for instance. There again, they did not seem to have the same problems wiith other brands.

[Dave2002]

Another complication with amazon reviews is that often products get muddled up. If you look at the reviews for the V and P versions I suspect that this may have happened, though I can't be sure. Anyway, there's no real reason why products made in Belarus should be any worse than products made by US companies and actually manufactured somewhere in the far east. If my SSD packs up in a few months time I'll go back to MyMemory - though I am taking the precaution of backing everything up to hard drives. The trouble with this is that hard drives are vulnerable in a different way ... nothing's perfect. SSDs ought to be more robust.

I'm not sure that defragging would cause problems quickly - though admittedly writing/rewriting to SSD might make problems more likely. They are supposed to be able to go for 000s of cycles, so failing in a couple of months is not good news.

Whether Apple's APFS helps for SSDs I'm not sure - does Win 10 have anything similar?

[Bryn]

Another complication with amazon reviews is that often products get muddled up. If you look at the reviews for the V and P versions I suspect that this may have happened, though I can't be sure. Anyway, there's no real reason why products made in Belarus should be any worse than products made by US companies and actually manufactured somewhere in the far east. If my SSD packs up in a few months time I'll go back to MyMemory - though I am taking the precaution of backing everything up to hard drives. The trouble with this is that hard drives are vulnerable in a different way ... nothing's perfect. SSDs ought to be more robust.

I'm not sure that defragging would cause problems quickly - though admittedly writing/rewriting to SSD might make problems more likely. They are supposed to be able to go for 000s of cycles, so failing in a couple of months is not good news.

Whether Apple's APFS helps for SSDs I'm not sure - does Win 10 have anything similar?

Windows 8 onwards have the option of ReFS. I have not tried it. It is mainly aimed at archiving and a bug in the infamous Windows 10 Anniversary Update apparently caused problems with it. The Lenovo ideapad 320s I am currently employing uses NTFS. Despite its drawbacks, FAT32 is still the file system found on most USB sticks, for Mac compatibility.

[Dave2002]

The point about APFS is that it’s supposed to be flash memory friendly, in some way. FAT32 is indeed one way of getting compatibility between Mac and PCs, but APFS might be more apppriate for SSDs unless they are to operate as cross platform carriers.

[Bryn]

There is also this SSD - possibly slightly better - at the same price - https://www.mymemory.co.uk/integral-...2-b459eda9518c

This is a ‘P’ version, rather than a ‘V’ version.

Looks similar but slightly faster read and write speeds.

On amazon uk a number of people have reported failures with Integral SSDs, but they may just have been unlucky.
I was surprised to find that Integral appears to be based in Belarus.
https://integral.by/en

Bit of an update. The 240GB Integral SSD 'P' version was delivered today. My 500GB SSD is a Crucial, while the 120GB ones are Kingston. I really must take the time and effort to instal them in their respective laptops. Opening up this HP 15-ay106na will also give me the oportunity to check the make-up of its 8GB of RAM.Hopefully it's a single SODIMM, but I fear it will be 2x4GB. That would make upgrading to 16GB less attractive, though I could use them to upgrade one of my old 2x2GB Acer i3 machines.