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Good SSD for 2012 mini?
- Thread starter jgw1283
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Had the 240GB version in a Windows 10 laptop for a while, no problems. Just bought another the same size for my 2011 Mini, hope it fits and works fine.
In my opinion no, the price increase is not worth it. You could almost buy another SSD for the $75-$100 premium. Never had an issue with SanDisk myself. I have one in both my Windows PC and my Mac mini.
Only Samsung 850 Pro SSDs in my company's 7 2012 Mini Servers, picked up a 500GB Pro at Fry's for my own personal unit. Fry's ran a sale last weekend plus a coupon code got it down to $177 - about $20 more than the EVO. The 850 EVO is a great storage disk, the 850 Pro is a much better OS disk - we have benchmarked them both as OS drives, still buying EVO SSDs too.
That SanDisk SSD? Pass...
That SanDisk SSD? Pass...
I bought one from Crucial. Basically turned my 2012 Mac mini into a brand new machine.
SanDisk is not "made by Western Digital". WDC just bought SanDisk, and WDC had essentially zero SSD experience prior (they did own Virident by way of HGST but never produced SSDs directly).
I personally would only buy Intel, Toshiba and Samsung SSDs. They are all fabs (they make their own flash). While SanDisk does operate fabs, they are most well known for SDHC cards, and less known for the quality of their SSDs.
[doublepost=1471873456][/doublepost]Oh, and to add: Crucial doesn't make NAND Flash. They put SSDs together from other people's stuff. For commodity SSDs I would only buy from the vendors that are also fabs.
I personally would only buy Intel, Toshiba and Samsung SSDs. They are all fabs (they make their own flash). While SanDisk does operate fabs, they are most well known for SDHC cards, and less known for the quality of their SSDs.
[doublepost=1471873456][/doublepost]Oh, and to add: Crucial doesn't make NAND Flash. They put SSDs together from other people's stuff. For commodity SSDs I would only buy from the vendors that are also fabs.
Actually SanDisk are also known for their SSDs being used in high end enterprise all flash storage arrays, such as HPE 3PAR. I'm sure they can manage a lowly consumer grade SSD.
Saying you should only buy SSDs from brands that make there own flash, is a bit like saying you should only buy Samsung phones because they make their own components. If you look at it that simplistically, iPhones are just a collection of parts manufactured by other companies, so nobody should buy one.
Saying you should only buy SSDs from brands that make there own flash, is a bit like saying you should only buy Samsung phones because they make their own components. If you look at it that simplistically, iPhones are just a collection of parts manufactured by other companies, so nobody should buy one.
I think you are little off with your information here. Micron makes NAND chips and Micron owns Crucial and Crucial uses Micron NAND in their SSDs. Aside from that, who cares who assembles the parts. Apple uses all manner of third party parts from outside vendors then pays companies like Foxconn to do the assembly. I have not seen an evidence to indicate either setup is more reliable than the other.
Honestly, I think the SSD market is now fairly mature and you can hardly go wrong with any of the major brands out there.
Good points and understood.
I just have anecdotal knowledge of the reliability of SanDisk consumer/commercial (non-enterprise) grade SSDs: a company I used to work at was acquired by SanDisk and I keep in touch with may of the SEs there who were buying SanDisk SSDs for home use.
I am also biased by the internal qualifications of the company that I work for, and we only (today) use Toshiba and Samsung because they are the best SSDs for our all flash array.
So your points are respectfully well taken but my buying habits won't change.
[doublepost=1472133188][/doublepost]
Good point, my list wasn't completely accurate.
I just never saw Crucial as a good DISK vendor: SSDs have disk interfaces and need to have both a quality implementation of the SATA interface as well as the internal NAND controller technology, all layered on top of the NAND Flash itself. Toshiba and Samsung both had large successful disk businesses and that allowed them to bring along a long history of knowledge before they made their first SSDs. Intel on the other had did NOT, and stumbled mightily with their first SSDs, corrupting/bricking many people's drives before they got it right.
Last I noted, Crucial is using a 3rd party controller. Samsung, Toshiba, and Intel use controllers of their own design, so it's possible for them to have intellectual property that makes the controllers work better with their NAND. Flash is not "generic" and there are errata on every chip. Flash has standard interfaces and yet all Flash has vendor proprietary interfaces/commands. When I worked at Fusion-io, we had to deal with this as we sourced NAND from multiple vendors (Samsung and Intel/Micron for the most part).
Crucial is a great memory vendor. I'd buy from them any day of the week for RAM. They are probably fine for most people for an SSD.
I guess I am just weary of the early days of SSDs where everyone was using 3rd party controllers, and SSDs dropped like flies hit with bug spray (thinking specifically about my OCZ debacles... multiple dead SSDs). On the flip side, I've had nothing but great personal experience with Samsung and Toshiba and Intel devices (since avoiding the X-25 issues). And I know why we qualify and disqualify some SSDs (not comprehensive however) from my current job in a company that ships an All Flash Array.
I hear you and remember that time also. I certainly do see your logic, but I just think we are in a pretty mature market now where this is not much of an issue. Just off the top of my head, I can't even think of a recent forum post from someone that had a aftermarket SSD die on them at all. They all seem pretty reliable now.
I appreciate your comments though.
I hear you and remember that time also. I certainly do see your logic, but I just think we are in a pretty mature market now where this is not much of an issue. Just off the top of my head, I can't even think of a recent forum post from someone that had a aftermarket SSD die on them at all. They all seem pretty reliable now.
I appreciate your comments though.
At least we can all be reasonable and thoughtful on this forum! Appreciate your points as well.
On a side note, one of the most frustrating SSDs I own is a Seagate SSD. It's a low end enterprise SSD. I bought it as it went on sale, I think it was going end of sale. So I got two, relatively cheaply. It's slower than my Samsungs, runs hotter, just a boring old drive. It sort of reinforced my "only buy from Samsung, Toshiba and Intel" mantra. Seagate knows a lot about HDDs, but less about Flash.
[doublepost=1472135320][/doublepost]The other thing is that I have multiple TB of Fusion-io flash (PCIe cards) that I run in my MacPro 4,1 and another server, all running ESXi. Great thing about this is it's fast, ULTRA high endurance, and I can run Mac OS X VMs without hacking them on the Mac Pro.
