120GB Hyundai SSD for $14.99 at Walmart.com

[Keebler]

Walmart presently has the Hyundai 120GB SSD for $14.99

240GB is presently $24.99

480GB is presently $43.99

960GB is OOS (but it was $81.99 earlier today)

[Honkinggoose]

@shinobi

This drive came all the way from California packed in little more than thick paper, with no protection from impact whatsoever. Am not pleased or satisfied.

Now I feel quite vindicated in still holding a grudge agains buy.com and almost thinking about considering rakuten.

[scripta]

@shinobi

This drive came all the way from California packed in little more than thick paper, with no protection from impact whatsoever.

SSDs don’t require impact protection. There are no moving parts, so as long as nobody takes a hammer to it, it should be fine.

[shinobi]

@scripta

it should be fine.

Got it up and testing as boot drive on my most active computer earlier today. So far so good. Perhaps I lucked out. Hope so.

More will be known in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, well deserved respite, at least temporarily, for my old Intel 240G SSD.

[shinobi]

Update:

WalMart is now meeting competition’s price:

At WalMart

120GB drive is $14.99

240GB drive is just $23.99

You can still use the links in the OP.

If you want a 960GB SSD, WalMart has 'em for a hundred bucks!

And still all these drives feature the five year warranty.

It’s gettin’ crazy out there on these SSDs.

[Honkinggoose]

@shinobi

240GB drive is just $23.99

I’ve now stepped into this decade (right on time) thanks to @shinobi’s ceaseless flogging of these critters. You’ve probably got Walmart or Hyundai stock stashed between your silver coins. We’ll see how the transfer goes tonight.

The downside may be that I have to adjust my “while it boots” chores.

[shinobi]

@Honkinggoose

I’ve now stepped into this decade (right on time) thanks to @shinobi’s ceaseless flogging of these critters.

Ahhhh, another victim!!

Seriously, I have grown tired of attempting to keep up with the prices of these damn things, both at WalMart and elsewhere. I say this now with authority:

The price will be whatever it is when you get there!!

These prices are yoyoing . . . down today . . . up tomorrow. These drives clearly are in play.

I saw the $14.99 price at WalMart and did nothing. But my innate urges got the better of me. Went back the next day to buy and they had raised the price. That saved me from buying something I don’t need.

Going forward it’ll not surprise me if the prices descend once again. But I cannot keep up with the changes.

[shinobi]

Just shortly after I wrote the above, Rakuten got me again.

Q: But Shin, you said you’d never . . .

I know. I know. But they got me.

I just paid a bit less than eleven bucks, tax included, for one of the 120GB drives. I mean, geez, how on earth was I supposed to resist that?!!

Well, I was unable to resist. They got me with their $10 purchase bonus. I have never in my life bought memory that inexpensively. Never.

Note:

The $10 bonus I received came as a result of my earlier purchase, at Rakuten, of the 240GB Hyundai drive, as documented up thread. I either had to use the ten bucks or lose it. I used it.

[meed18]

Shin,

What are you doing with all these SMALL SSDs? You’ve been posting about 120 GB SSDs since February. I assume you have purchased at least 5 of them this year at this point. What do you need all of them for?

Also, why do you still consider a 120GB SSD for $15 a deal now that the 1TB drives are below the $100 price point?

[shinobi]

@meed18

What do you need all of them for?

You can never have enough of these things. I use 'em in USB enclosures for portable memory . . . like a thumb drive except larger. And of course you can also use 'em for boot drives.

@meed18

I assume you have purchased at least 5 of them this year at this point.

More than that, actually. I’ve lost count.

@meed18

Also, why do you still consider a 120GB SSD for $15 a deal now that the 1TB drives are below the $100 price point?

Today I paid closer to $20, actually, but the price was reduced by my $10 bonus and by some cash back.

I buy the smaller drives because these cheap drives CAN go belly up. I’ve lost none so far, but that is just undeserved good fortune.

Now when a drive turns turtle, of course, you rely at that point on the five year warranty. But what about the lost data on the drive?! To address that issue I use a divide and conquer strategy, avoiding the larger drives on purpose. When one of my drives does give up the ghost, and it HAS to happen eventually, I will lose at most 240GB of “stuff”, not a TB.

How does that old aphorism go? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, is that it? I have a number of “baskets”.

[jerosen]

@shinobi

When one of my drives does give up the ghost, and it HAS to happen eventually, I will lose at most 240GB of “stuff”, not a TB.

ARe you backing up your data ?

I mean rather than buy 5 x 120GB drives for $20 a pop you could have a 2x 512 with a mirror for the same price.

[shinobi]

@jerosen

ARe you backing up your data ?

Oh, sure. As mentioned elsewhere I use the WD Red HDDs for that purpose. However, there are short intervals of time, before I can back up on the Reds, when the data might be standalone on the SSDs. So much data. So little time.

BTW and FWIW, for obvious reasons I do not keep the Red drives powered up and spinning all the time.

[meed18]

For all the little drives you’ve bought this year, you could have a nice head start on purchasing a much more useful and failsafe NAS mirror without having to constantly swap drives from your USB port.

[scripta]

A NAS mirror is not a complete backup solution. A mirror usually contains an instant copy of the data, so if the original data is corrupted or deleted, so is the data on the mirror. A mirror is a solution for exactly one problem – total failure of one of the mirrored drives.

For a more complete backup solution you still need a periodic offline backup, preferably more than one.

IMO the biggest problem with having so many drives is management. The “divide-and-conquer strategy” shinobi mentioned makes management exponentially more difficult.

[shinobi]

@scripta

The “divide-and-conquer strategy” shinobi mentioned makes management exponentially more difficult.

The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes just a little bit longer.

[meed18]

@scripta

if the original data is corrupted

An offline backup will only save you from this if you discover the corrupted data before the next backup. For most of us, that’s very little additional security for too much extra work.

Now that NAS mirrors and cloud storage are affordable and easy for consumer use, the only backups I have are completely automatic. I use a NAS and Google drive/photos for everything, and Amazon photos for a 3rd photo backup. I learned that was all I would actually do when I realized all my old external drives turned into paperweights a few months after I bought them.

It sounds like Shin is the exception in that he takes a much more hands on and methodical approach to data management and backups than most consumers.

Or maybe I’m wrong and Shin is the normal one and I’m the exception.

[scripta]

@meed18

An offline backup will only save you from this if you discover the corrupted data before the next backup. For most of us, that’s very little additional security for too much extra work.

I think it’s called a “3-2-1 backup strategy” – 2 local drives mirrored + 1 offline.

I actually use two drives that take turns for offline backup every 6-12 months, so I have 12-24 months to discover corrupted data. If your data is organized or you use some backup software, it should not be much work.

IMO with the advancements in file systems (friends don’t let friends use FAT32) and hardware, the days of inadvertent data corruption are pretty much gone, especially with SSDs – there’s extra space allocated for block-level errors and any data is relocated and verified automatically. I think there’s a higher chance of losing the entire drive than losing a few bits. No moving parts means you don’t have to park the magnetic head or fear it damaging the platters. The real risk today is ransomware that takes its time to encrypt your perfectly good data before asking for payment.

[meed18]

@scripta

IMO with the advancements in file systems (friends don’t let friends use FAT32) and hardware, the days of inadvertent data corruption are pretty much gone, especially with SSDs – there’s extra space allocated for block-level errors and any data is relocated and verified automatically. I think there’s a higher chance of losing the entire drive than losing a few bits. No moving parts means you don’t have to park the magnetic head or fear it damaging the platters. The real risk today is ransomware that takes its time to encrypt your perfectly good data before asking for payment.

This is my thought too which is why I just let my NAS and my cloud services back up my data in real time (cloud) or weekly (NAS).

[scripta]

I think you missed my last sentence, because I don’t think your strategy would survive a ransomware attack, which could take longer than a week.

[meed18]

Correct. I’m not doing anything to guard against a ransomware attack. If I worried about what an actual attacker could do to my data vs. a hardware failure or software crash/corruption, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I look at it similarly to owning vs. carrying a firearm. I own guns and made sure I am proficient. I’m capable of carrying a firearm everytime I leave the house too, but I choose not to because of the inconvenience vs. likelihood of needing it.