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Mac Mini Vault has offered SSD upgrades since early 2012. ‘Enterprise’ quality drives were reaching affordable prices at usable capacities. Speed and performance are the main benefits of upgrading to an SSD. But at what cost? Early SSD technology had similar (or less) life expectancies of hard drives. The Samsung 840 PRO drives we have been using carried a 5 year manufacturer’s warranty. Independent testing (link) has shown the 840 PRO to still be working after writing over 1PB of data to it. At the same time we’ve seen the 5400RPM HDD in the Mac mini as the most common failure we experience. We have the tools, parts, and ability to swap out the hard drives quickly. As long as the customer has a solid backup, we can restore data or sometimes clone off failing drives. We have yet to see any of the Samsung 830, 840 PRO, or 850 PRO drives fail. These SSD upgrades are proving to be an effective measure to preventing data loss and prolonging drive failure.

Samsung has come out with a new 850 PRO SSD that uses 3D NAND technology. They now offer a 1TB drive in the ‘PRO’ line up. The best news yet, all 850 PRO drives have a 10 year manufacturer’s warranty. To read more about the drives and technology, we recommend reading Anandtech’s review. Bottom line, the new 850 PRO is faster, uses less energy, and is more consistent than the drives it replaces.

We have all sizes of the Samsung 850 PRO listed on our order form. Now through October 3rd 2014 any new or existing customer that orders a Samsung 850 PRO and mentions this post will receive a free month colo service credit on their account. We can clone your existing hard drive to your new SSD as a part of the install. We also have a limited amount of 840 PRO drives in stock, available at deep discounts.

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