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I remember buying a 80GB Intel SATA SSD (which was $450 USD at the time) and putting it into the DVD drive bay in a 2009 17" Macbook Pro. At the time there was no official SSD support, but there was an aluminum holder you could buy to remove the slimline slot loading DVD drive, and put a 2.5" form factor (7.5 or 9.5mm?) height SSD or HDD in its place. Was a huge performance increase for the OS/boot drive.

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I just bought a few more Intel 310 Series 40GB mSATA ssd’s on eBay for $10 each. They are ancient and comparatively slow, but reliable and extremely low power, so much so they can be perfectly powered by a USB 2.0 port in an enclosure if needed, and don’t need a heat sink. My original 80GB version ($190) that I put in my W520 thinkpad in 2011 is still going strong.

Basically I like to use them as a cheap “better” thumb drive, putting ventoy on them with no concern for space, along with a fat32 partition for bios updates.

These along with a nanoKVM box my siblings can attach to the computers I built for them makes remote troubleshooting relatively painless when rustdesk isn’t sufficient.

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