The next great 2.5" SATA Boot SSD deal $20

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Patrick

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I received a reader tip on this one. I never knew Intel made a 313 SSD series. Here are the specs for this drive: Intel® SSD 313 Series (20GB, 2.5in SATA 3Gb/s, 25nm, SLC) Product Specifications

Key points to note here:
  • SATA II only, so I will expect it to be slow.
  • These are old drives, Q1 2012 launch date. That should not be taken lightly.
  • Intel SLC NAND!!!!!
  • Active power rateed at 150mW per specs so these are very low power drives
  • They are selling for $20 each
HP 678348-001 Intel 313 Series SSDSA2UP020G3H 20GB 3.0Gb/s 2.5" SATA SSD

I like the 16GB Kingston M.2 drives, but this is an option if you want a cheap boot drive for something like a mirrored pfSense install or FreeNAS boot drive using 2.5" to keep m.2 open for NVMe.
 

BlueFox

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Those are pretty much the same as the 311 line. Both were used with Intel's SRT. Had one in my pfSense box and another my HTPC for years now (4 I think?). You can also get them in mSATA (what I have) instead of 2.5". So far so good here.
 

Patrick

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Patrick

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Indecided

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Agreed, these make good boot drives. We managed to get a few dozen NOS 24gb drives from one of our Intel distributors for about $10 a pop when they were clearing them out. Pity they didn't have more. Slow but reliable. We've ran a few dozen kingfast 32gb (China brand) for some of the non-crucial and had seen an almost 25% failure rate. Well, you get what you pay for.
 
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T_Minus

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Agreed, these make good boot drives. We managed to get a few dozen NOS 24gb drives from one of our Intel distributors for about $10 a pop when they were clearing them out. Pity they didn't have more. Slow but reliable. We've ran a few dozen kingfast 32gb (China brand) for some of the non-crucial and had seen an almost 25% failure rate. Well, you get what you pay for.
Would like to get a couple NOS and a fanless mini pfsense that can handle 2x of them for mirrored setup :D (msata) so far can't find any boards like that, none that make sense $$-wise or power at least :(
 

BLinux

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Patrick

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I have yet to have a 320 40GB fail on me ~40 x many years.
 

Evan

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I have yet to have a 320 40GB fail on me ~40 x many years.
Don’t have as many but same, they seem to take a beating no issues, not super fast but workable and much better than spinning disks.
(Edit, mine all 120gb versions though)
 

aij

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I recently got two SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB SD Card (SDSDXXG-032G-GN4IN) as boot drives. (32 GB for $21)

I was expecting awful performance, but it's even worse than I expected. Hardware(ish) RAID-1 across the two is getting me 14 MB/s reads. (Using the integrated SD controller in a C240 M3.)

They may do a lot better in a controller that supports UHS-I, but otherwise I do not recommend them.
 

Marsh

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Speaking of Intel 320 SSD.

Jan 2017 , I made a BO $80 each for 6 x Intel 320 series 600GB SSD , work out to $0.14 per GB
At the time , I wasn't sure where to deploy it.
But I am glad the SSD are working well in the Cepth Cluster.
 

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Marsh

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Intel 320 is such workhorse, it is my go to drive in my lab.

I collected all the cheap Intel 320 SSD from Ebay that I could.

I still using a used Intel 320 600GB , when I received the used Intel 320 SSD , it had 900TB data written to it.
Intel tool box program still shown health with over 80% life.
 

BLinux

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the more i look into this, i really like the 100mbps write speeds. the size is meh at 20GB, but that is still plenty for a server OS. i'm tempted, even though I just got 8x Intel 320 40G drives... are you guys just stocking up on these for boot drives for future projects? how many? 10? 20? 50?
 

Marsh

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I stock up on cheap SSD of all size, less than$0.18 to $0.15 per GB.
Exception to the price is the small size boot SSD.
There is never enough of small size SSD.