http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/HNSNC512GBSJ/?APC=READERSPC&Source=Blast12Sep

Has anyone seen this? Looks like a really great deal, but I don't know what the reviews on this are like. I know that Apple does use this, but does it degrade over time like some other SSD's I know.

Anyone have any experience with this?

[Edited on September 27, 2012 at 2:30 AM. Reason : a]

9/27/2012 2:29:48 AM

in SSD world, that's old tech. Best try to find newer models using smaller NAND chips than 32nm with faster transfer rates and SATA III interface instead of II.

Honestly, if you don't need an SSD right now, wait a few months. We are just in the middle of an SSD price war and high capacity drives like these's will become even more reasonably priced.

9/27/2012 5:01:06 AM

I keep going back to this and the amount of space seems to outweigh the speed. I have a MBP Late 2008 so it's not SATA III compliant.

Anyone know how this holds up? Does it degrade over time?

9/30/2012 3:43:18 PM

Every single SSD degrades over time. All of them. They literally wear out. And generally the performance degrades as well until you reinstall, though I believe trim is supposed to help with that.

9/30/2012 5:46:14 PM

I was pretty pissed when my SSD just died and I had to then reinstall windows on my "content" drive. Plus all my old hard drives from the early 2000s still function when I plug them in. Fuck SSD tech.

9/30/2012 6:16:25 PM

Quote :

" I have a MBP Late 2008 so it's not SATA III compliant."

Knowing what you were going to use it for would have been nice to know, but as a deal, its ok if you are looking for a decent large capacity SSD for your laptop. Just do note that its 9.5mm high, a number of laptops require 7mm to fit properly. I would make sure your MBP can handle that.

Quote :

"Every single SSD thing in the world degrades over time."

Fixed that for yah.

What you should need to know is MTF or mean time till failure for normal operations. In most instances, SSD's should theoretically last a lot longer than consumer mechanical hard drives... physically speaking. In reality, not all SSD's quality are built the same so some may have higher than normal failure rates right now as the technology is still being proven for mass markets, but they are getting better. Doesn't mean they are completely dog shit and will die in a few months. They aren't that fragile (unless you go with OCZ brand, lol)

Quote :

"They literally wear out. And generally the performance degrades as well until you reinstall, though I believe trim is supposed to help with that."

They don't "wear out" in the normal sense of a mechanical hard drive, they only wear out due to the undesirable phenomenon called "write amplification". The SSD cells only degrade when written to, not when information is being pulled or read from. Each cell should have a normal life of about 100 million writes using the latest tech, which is still more than enough for something like 1.5 million hours of normal operation.

Performance doesn't exactly degrade overtime without cause, it will degrade overtime if your drive does not perform garbage collection or TRIM operations to clean it out. Its the SSD version of defragmentation operation tool. Also, similar to HDD's, you shouldn't fill it all the way up; need to leave room for garbage collection/TRIM operations and its much more important as performance can severely suffer like slower than usb 1.0 rates.

Unlike normal hard drives of where a file can simply be rewritten over, every new save or resave means the file is being completely copied and resaved again, but instead being instantly deleted, the files (as information is saved in each cell), it waits till a cell is completely filled, transfers the relevant data still in the cell into a completely fresh cell and starts over. This is done to limit the amount of excessive writes for each cell and increase reliability over time.

This is why its generally a good idea to keep temp or page files off SSD's as they'll "wear out" your writes faster than normal. Intel and a few other makers do make commercial grade SSD's that are much more resilient to write amplification than consumer grade SSD's that you and I would buy, but they are 10x+ the cost.

And its a myth that a full install would be needed to cure your slow SSD problems...


But like any piece of technology, you should practice constant backups to ensure your sensitive files are not at risk.

9/30/2012 7:24:53 PM

Well, that was a lot of writing to pretty much reiterate 90% of what I said in more detail.

Don't get me wrong. I like the detail, I think it was a bit overkill for someone who is too lazy to do their own research.

9/30/2012 7:43:55 PM

I appreciate that post Jbaz. Thank you.

9/30/2012 8:03:31 PM

Atleast this way, OP has a better understanding of how things work in an SSD and what to look for instead of buying into some marketing BS that really doesn't make sense or work. I just hate the idea of people upgrading or throwing away money when they don't need to, specially if a simple solution is avaliable or just not cost effective for a certain demographic.


As for my first response, we should start seeing SATA III 512 drives for the same cost as OP SATA II drives. Even if your laptop is capped at SATA II, you would still benefit from better, stable NAND's and if the drive uses a better, updated controller chip. The biggest bog downs with SSD's has always been handling compressed files (archived as in zip, jpeg, mpeg's), which can drop from 500+MB/sec to just a crawl of 20MB/sec in some older drives (depending on NAND and controller type as well as what is being transferred and by what application).

It all depends on what you want and the price you are willing to pay for it.

9/30/2012 8:06:11 PM

Quote :

"It all depends on what you want and the price you are willing to pay for it."

this...for example, i still can't fathom paying that kind of money for "the OS boots 10 seconds faster!" and "photoshop opens in half the time!"

i'm sure there are other "benefits", but there's not a single thing an SSD can do or does that makes the ridiculous price worth it to ME...especially since i can expect it to crap out before my HDDs do (barring the random, unexpected catastrophic failure, of course)

also, capacity is WAY more important to me than shaving precious SECONDS off tasks

[Edited on September 30, 2012 at 9:45 PM. Reason : .]

9/30/2012 9:44:30 PM

JBaz, I really appreciate your help. I have a fuller, stronger understanding now and will definitely wait to see how this price war ends.

Again, thank you for the plethora of information. I tried finding problems with SSD but only was met on how it was so much better than HDD. I get it, they are better than HDD, but still wanted to know what the pitfalls were and could not seem to wade through the diluted information.

10/1/2012 1:22:23 AM

Quote :

"this...for example, i still can't fathom paying that kind of money for "the OS boots 10 seconds faster!" and "photoshop opens in half the time!""

Me either, I paid 40 bucks for my 120gb SSD and its the older SATA II drive. I love it to death, but I did mine as a scratch disk for temp storage of media files for video editing more than anything else. Maybe a game or two on there for instant map loads, but the OS is still on the regular HDD just cause I have no need to reinstall and move shit over, also the fact that I never turn off my computer and have so much RAM that I keep photoshop, premier and after effects open 24/7 as well... lol

So the two selling abilities of SSD is pretty much rendered moot for me. Only got it cause it was cheap and actually has a decent impact in working with HD video files.


The two other "selling features" is the fact that there's no noise and it uses a lot less energy (aka, very low heat output). If I was going to build an HTPC, I'd use a cheap 60GB SSD for $20 to install the OS on and then stream everything over the network from my media server.

10/1/2012 11:49:11 AM

My set up is placing the OS and other programs on the SSD while other media files such as photos, music and movies are placed in a HDD. The entire system does move a lot faster because of the read/write speeds of an SSD, but at the same time, I simply didn't know enough about SSD's. My system has not slowed down even a little since I've had the SSD and it's breathed new life into my machine.

The selling points aren't very accurate, but it's just a sample of how well it works. The entire system is cooler, so it does run more efficiently.

With the mentioned price war, I'm hoping to see a stronger threshold across systems.

10/1/2012 1:31:09 PM

Storage space is not a concern of mine, at all. I have my OS and 2 games installed. Having the games on the the SSD makes a huge difference in load times. My OS boots up in just under half the time my laptop with a regular HDD (practically mirrored systems).

Overall, the performance gain is minimal compared to the dollars spent. I mean, we are talking just seconds of performance gains here and there. But overall, I enjoy my computing experience much, much more.

For comparison, I got this nearly 5 months ago.
Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F120GBGT-BK 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
$129.99 after MIL

It's now sitting at $115 on newegg and amazon without a rebate.


[Edited on October 2, 2012 at 5:06 AM. Reason : .]

10/2/2012 5:02:42 AM

you can get better SSD's for $80 or less for the same size. Shit, Samsung 830 128GB is $90 without any rebates on newegg right now.

10/4/2012 6:02:20 AM

I'm keeping my eye out for anything sandforce driven because no TRIM is necessary. Anyone find any deals on those SSD's?

10/7/2012 4:46:01 AM