Small capacity SSD's / new old stock

[PrimaryTech]

Hi all, haven't posted in ages as I no longer have IT as my primary role but I've been asked to try and revitalise some Samsung NB-30 netbooks. The ram was maxxed out about 5 years ago (2GB) and they've not been used in 2.5 years. I'm looking to source some cheap 32/64GB 2.5" SSDs to install a lite Linux distro so the netbooks can be used for Socrative, Kahoot and TTRockstars. I know that 120GB drives are retailing at £15 but I really only need 32GB as they will essentially be cloudbooks.

Any help gratefully received.

[Arthur]

The only place you will likely be able to get new 32GB SSDs is from AliExpress. These cost around $11 (~£8.50) each and will all be from Chinese brands you have never heard of (and therefore a bit of an unknown quantity).

 

www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20191129224427&SearchText=2.5%22+32GB+SATA+SSD

 

There are quite a lot of used 8 year old 64GB Crucial M4s on eBay that sell for around £10-£12. For the savings involved, that's hardly worth it. Smaller SSDs from that era will have firmware and/or reliability issues. Google "OCZ issues" and you will see what I mean.

 

Based on the hassle of buying and potentially poor reliability of the SSDs above, I would say you are better off just getting the £15 120GB SSDs from a reputable UK reseller.

[DalekSec]

Buy the 120GB ones as when the devices finally goes pop at least you have a decent sized SSD to reuse in a Windows PC

[DrBeaker]

Those netbooks won't benefit from the SSD upgrade. They're simply too underpowered. Had same discussion a couple of years ago and we just retired the kit from service. It'd already been upgraded with RAM etc we couldn't improve it any further.

[PotNoodleTech]

Everything benefits from an SSD upgrade. Now whether the cost of the upgrade is financially worth it versus the cost of putting the money towards refurbished equipment that will do a much better job is the key question.

 

I would say if their are old enough that they only have 2GB ram it's probably time to let them fade out. By the time you fit a SSD and a cloudready licence and a google licence you could almost have bought a nice refurbished Dell Optiplex 3020!

 

My 2p.

[DrBeaker]

...Now whether the cost of the upgrade is financially worth it versus the cost of putting the money towards refurbished equipment that will do a much better job is the key question...

 

+1 This. So many things in our world that get overlooked at cost because you can't see it on a spreadsheet and nice fancy graph.

[msi_school]

I am with @mhaddock there comes a time when you have to let these devices slip quietly into the recycling bin.

[crc-ict]

If they've sat for 2.5 years, I'd be really surprised if many of the batteries even still take or hold a charge.

 

Agree with others here, these are well past their useful date. They're only a single core CPU too.

[DrBeaker]

If they've sat for 2.5 years, I'd be really surprised if many of the batteries even still take or hold a charge.

 

Agree with others here, these are well past their useful date. They're only a single core CPU too.

 

Generally with those Atom CPU#'s the bottleneck is the processor itself and then the screen of 1024 x 600 - sometimes doesn't meet a lot of the minimum specs for apps these days either. The CPU and chipset only supports up to 2GB RAM on netbooks.

 

[PrimaryTech]

Thanks for all your replies, based on what they've been proposed for (TTRockstars, Kahoot, Nearpod and Accelerated Reader) It may be cost effective in the long run to replace them all with Kindle fires. I've just done an eBay search for NB30's and they seem to go for around the £30 mark so we'd be near cost-neutral in selling them and putting the money towards kindles.

[crc-ict]

Thanks for all your replies, based on what they've been proposed for (TTRockstars, Kahoot, Nearpod and Accelerated Reader) It may be cost effective in the long run to replace them all with Kindle fires. I've just done an eBay search for NB30's and they seem to go for around the £30 mark so we'd be near cost-neutral in selling them and putting the money towards kindles.

 

Make sure to trial Kindle Fires with your setup before buying big though.

 

Our after-school club provision here has some, and they are a pain the backside to get working properly with our filtering system

[Oaktech]

Tablet computing is apparently the way forward...