Free shipping Free shipping. The only minor issue is the hex end on the one wrench is a little small for the 3 studs, but I 2011 Apple Mac Mini 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 8GB RAM 128GB SSD + WARRANTY 249.99. This allowed me to add a solid state disk (SSD) to a Mac Mini Mid 2011 in the upper bay (this is the bay that is closer to the top of the computer, which is on the bottom when you have the Mac Mini upside down to work on it).Basically, adding an SSD is like making your machine a year to 18 months younger. Comparing that to the average for Macbooks - which is 101.96 - you can see that something's changed.If you look at this comparison of two similar-specced Macbooks, one with and one without an SSD, the difference is pretty dramatic when it comes to the disk work - and that affects everything else. Hard numbersYou can see precisely how much the SSD gooses the performance: using the Xbench benchmarking suite, the Macbook scored 193.67. The drive in question is a Kingston SSDNow 100 256GB (model number KINGSTON SVP100S2256G), which I'm using in a three-year-old MacBook laptop running Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 with 4GB of RAM (the maximum it can take). Mini PC/HTPC, i5 NUC Tall with 16GB DDR4 Ram, Kingston 512GB SSD.That's quite an improvement - equivalent to upgrading your machine completely. When it comes to upgrading Mac minis, I think we’re in a pretty nice sweet spot right now.Innuos Zen Mini MK3 Frank Prowse Hi-Fi is the ONLY authorised Innuos reseller in Perth.(I've certainly noticed it on this ageing laptop.) All in favourThe arguments in favour of SSDs are plentiful. The only limits on an SSD drive's speed are its read/write speed (reading is usually much faster than writing) and the data throughput available on your computer - which will be mercilessly exposed by an SSD. The challenges of booting and running your machine off what is in effect a giant SD card are obvious enough: every address in memory is immediately accessible, because there's no need to wait for data to be located on the rotating drive, pulled off it, and pushed through to the motherboard.
What's it like to use?In a word: heavenly. Equally, all hard drives will die eventually which is why you keep backups, of course)The technology is still improving, so in a couple of years SSDs will be even faster and have even longer lives. The downsides? Compared to rotating drives, SSDs are:Expensive - about five times (laptop) to ten times (desktop) more for a given amount of storage, though the price is roughly halving every year and the differential is shrinkingEither require OS support for best use, or careful choice of the disk so that it will work with non-supporting OSsPotentially limited in life due to write/rewrite (in which the cells deteriorate over time it takes thousands of rewrites but is a known problem. It feels as though you've got an entirely new machine - but at only half the cost (in general) of that new machine.Overall, you'll spend more money getting an SSD than a standard rotating drive. Life with a standard drive quickly became painful: switching between tabs or pages or programs always involved waiting for the data - which sometimes seemed to be coming via container ship from somewhere across the world.By contrast, fitting an SSD is like giving your old computer a mad dose of amphetamines, but with none of the iilegality or medical problems. I'm a very heavy browser user (I'll regularly have four or five pages open, each with 20 or more tabs open). (If you boot your machine regularly that will turn into quite a saving.)Similarly, when logging into your user account, programs that used to take forever to get going will snap to attention and race to start.Everything happens faster, because - you realise - so much of what a modern operating system does is disk-bound: we're using browsers that cache more and more data (such as Google Maps and other Ajax-y things), we're trying to do more at the same time, and we want to switch between applications seamlessly.All that data has to be cached and paged back and forth from RAM to the disk as you move around having an SSD means you're far less aware of the paging process. What used to be a slow procession turns into a sprint: a startup that would take a minute takes about 10 seconds with an SSD. Kingston Ssd For 2011 Mini Plus Plenty OfWindows 7 does include TRIM previous versions of Windows do not. Keeping in TRIM: why it's importantIn OS support, a key element needed by most SSDs is called " TRIM", in which the OS tells the drive firmware which blocks it doesn't need anymore and can be wiped. Again, you will definitely notice the difference. If you really need to add lots more storage, then add-ons are cheap, with 1TB of USB 2.0-speed storage costing around £50 (and falling in a year's time that will buy 2TB).Desktop users can benefit too from SSDs: Microsoft's programmers, for instance, have begun replacing their rotating drives with them because of the faster boot up and other speed benefits. Laptops also tend to have less storage than desktops, so it's cheaper to upgrade them: personally I think that 256GB is the sweet spot for laptop and arguably desktop storage: it's enough for the OS plus plenty of room for films and music. Who benefits?Laptop users, who for years have lived with rotating drives that spin at 4200 or 5400 rpm (rotations per minute), will see a far bigger immediate difference than desktop users (where 7200rpm drives are more common) there's also the fact that if you drop your machine, there's no risk of the drive heads crashing and destroying your data. That needs to be handled by the OS (via TRIM), or the drive firmware.The Kingston SSD that I've been using, for instance, has firmware functions to carry out the TRIM work that OS X doesn't, meaning that the lifespan of the drive isn't affected. It doesn't matter to a magnetic drive whether a bit is set or not "deletion" is done in the disk index, not at the actual data point (the index entry pointing to the data is wiped, but the data remains on the drive).But if you overwrite an already-written SSD bit, that shortens the cell's life it's better to write new data to a cell that hasn't been used, or which has had less use. The upcoming version of OSX, 10.7 (aka Lion) does, though.This doesn't mean that you can't use SSDs with older versions of Windows or Mac OS X just that you have to be careful to make sure that the disk you buy has firmware that will perform the TRIM function that the OS won't.That's because normal OS operation involves a lot of writing, reading and then overwriting. 13th 2016 film download torrent 1080pMake absolutely sure that you have a working backup (ie that you can boot from the backup). Alternatively, you may want to hire a local expert. Different machines make it more or less easy to replace the hard drive (the newest MacBooks involve a fair amount of screwdriver-based jiggery-pokery), but Kingston, for example, provides fittings so that you can replace a laptop or desktop SATA hard drive, including the connectors you'd need. But backups are good, and having somewhere separate with a backup of your data mans you're obeying Schofield's Second Law, which is always good. (If you want to read more about TRIM/garbage collection, Anandtech has more technical detail than you can shake a well-specced stick at.) How to do itBear in mind that replacing your computer's hard drive requires you first to back it up to external storage. The key is that it makes your drive live longer. ![]()
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