BF deal: Inland Professional 2.5" 512GB SSD $19.99

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My HP EliteBook 8440p crashed upon booting last week, the internal HDD all of a sudden stopped being recognized. No big deal, it's only used at work to stream Spotify and access the web.

I popped over to Micro Center's website and came across this steal of a deal:

Inland Professional 2.5" 512GB SATA SSD

I used my hope laptop which is equipped with a HDD tray in place of the CD-ROM drive to initialize and format the new SSD, then cloned the internal drive 1:1 to the new drive (just to get the 8440p booted and running).

I swapped the newly cloned drive back into the 8440p and fired her up. Windows booted without issue, and once completed I ran Windows Restore to wipe everything and install a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro. I'm very happy with the results for $20.
 
Couple it with the 10.99 USB enclosure, and it'd be an okay flash drive/linux recovery drive, I don't trust anyone except, Samsung, Intel, Crucial/Micron, SK Hynix, or Kioxia with my important data.
 
True. I wouldn't store my life's work on one, but for $20 to have the speed and capacity of an SSD for some kind of software tools or projects or whatever, it's a steal. I wish my local store had them in stock.
 
Couple it with the 10.99 USB enclosure, and it'd be an okay flash drive/linux recovery drive, I don't trust anyone except, Samsung, Intel, Crucial/Micron, SK Hynix, or Kioxia with my important data.
Picked up that combo for some additional external storage for my laptop. When I need a couple hundred GB of OS/Software images and patches and more for installs, it’s nice to have a couple of these setups to carry it around.

I asked oilBabe to get me one for my Christmas stocking as well.
 
I've never heard of this brand, is it decent quality?
I looked at a lot of reviews a year or two ago on the lesser brands, and Inland and Lexar seemed to be the most durable cheapies. Was surprised at the poorer reviews for the Kingston cheapies since Kingston is known for its great quality control on its DDR memory sticks.

And maybe things have changed in a year. It's difficult to know the exact differences if any on such things since, like memory chips, there's probably only a few actual manufacturers, but drives can have different controllers inside, and maybe some companies sell the ones that didn't make the first quality-control cut. I've had a couple cheapie Lexars for a couple years on PCs that are on basically 24/7.

The cheapies aren't as fast as other SSDs, but most people probably won't be able to tell except maybe if they're moving big files, since they tend to have small memory buffers. Transfer a 10gb file, and the first 2gb or so may transfer fast but the rest can be (quite a bit) slower than mechanical drive speed. And cheapies' write speed slows down faster than the better SSDs. Not really a concern for most people.

As always, no matter what drive you use, if you'll be upset if it suddenly dies, better have a backup or two.
 
When has Lexar been a lesser brand, they've always been big in high speed flash cards targeting the professional photography market
Okay, change "lesser brands" to "cheapie drives." I lumped Kingston in there too as a lesser drive brand despite thinking very highly of them for memory sticks. We're talking about $20 drives.
 
Nice!

I recently picked up a Samsung 870 EVO 500GB, but it wasn't $20. :)
I just got tired of my excessively slow times on my security scans. So earlier this weel I went to a Samsung 980 PRO. 1T my scan times went from 4 hours to 26 minutes. I think the mean time to failure is supposed to be 1.5 million hours. It was $99 at Best buy but I saw it for $89 yesterday.
 
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