SSDNOW v100-128 GB in external USB enclosure

Dear all

Wish to ask if it is dangerous to the above SSD to be installed in an external USB enclosure. I installed my right out of the box in the external enclosure and connected it via USB to the computer but it was not detected. Referring back to the manual, they were saying: DO NOT install the SSD in the external drive enclosure that comes with it. Did I damage it in any way? I thought that it is not getting enough power using a single USB and that is why it is not detected. But I wish to know if I harmed my SSD by doing this????

Best regards

 

Do you typically read the manual for a product and then do the exact thing they specifically tell you NOT to do..? I'm just curious.

Try putting the SSD into an actual system, and see if it can be detected by either an OS installation disk, or partitioning software. If it is harmed then your warranty is probably toast.

 

Mostly yes, is there a problem with that? Aren't manuals written by the guys who actually work for the same company and understand the product fully?

 

Do I have a problem with it? Not at all. It's your money, if you want to potentially toss $200+ in the trash for no apparent reason, more power to you.

 

I don't understand actually what you mean. You were asking if I get back to a manual and I said yes and explained why. The SSD actually costs over $300 as I got it from the UK. And why would I want to toss the money in the trash? I was asking if I did something wrong for those with more experience which definitely means that I care about my money. Actually the thing that I missed is reading the manual beforehand. And I did a pretty logic thing inserting it in a drive that comes with it to clone the data.

 

Ah, I see what you mean know. I misunderstood; I was under the impression that you read the manual, saw that it said NOT to put it in the enclosure, then put it in regardless.

It didn't show up because it (probably) wasn't partitioned or formatted, which has to be done before an operating system will be able to see or utilize it.

While I'm not familiar with the Kingston SSD upgrade kits, I can assume that what you are supposed to do is this; Remove the old hard drive from your computer. Install the SSD into your computer, and put the old hard drive into the external enclosure. Then, clone the external hard drive in the enclosure onto the SSD installed in your computer.

 

now just to settle my curiosity ... why are we putting an SSD in a USB enclosure? the USB 2.0 interface will slow the SSD to standard HDD speeds anyways. E-SATA not so much.

but as the poster above said you will need to run a partitioning/ disk manager tool to create and setup drive partitins before it will show up on your system no matter what OS

 

From what I can gather, he bought one of those upgrade kits, which comes with an external enclosure. He put the SSD in the enclosure, thinking he was supposed to clone the still-installed-in-the-system hard drive to the SSD in the enclosure. Simple mistake, now he's just wanting to know if there was a possibility that the SSD was damaged by doing this.

 

Theoretically, I don't see how this would damage the SSD. The only thing I could really see it doing is not drawing enough power so it doesn't turn on. The enclosure was obviously built to handle the power output of a USB 2.0 port so it isn't like the setup was overloaded.

As others said, take the SSD out of the enclosure, plop it in your system, boot from the OS X DVD/thumb drive, and go from there.

 

Dear Malifiss, thank you so much for your understanding and explanation for my issue. I was at the Apple store today. A strange thing, I was told by a 6 year experienced specialist/genius that I better not install any SSD in a mac other than the ones that Apple makes because Snow Leopard is communicating with SSDs in a different way other than windows do. So for example if you are deleting data it will not delete it right.. He advised me to wait for the Lion upgrade which is designed to communicate with any SSD. May be he ment TRIM support. Does this mean that my SSD will slow over time?? Mine is a kingston SSDNow V100 notebook upgrade kit.

 

the genius was blowing smoke out of .... you know where. The ONLY way I can see you having issues is with some of the SATA 3 6Gbps drives. OSX does not actually communicate with the drives, the disk controller on the motherboard does. true OSX does not actually suport TRIM without a few hacks but almost all current SSD's have good garbage collection so I would not worry especially if you plan on upgrading to Lion in the future.

of my MBP's not a SINGLE one use an " Apple " SSD which by the way are still your off the shelf drives, with a premum markup.

 

Lion will have TRIM support, yes. Most modern SSDs have a background garbage collection that will allow the drive to clean up after itself, even if the OS doesn't support TRIM currently (from what I understand). Snow Leopard only has TRIM support for Apple-supplied SSDs. Without getting too overly-complicated, and since I'm not 100% sure of the validity of anything I've read on the web in regards to SL and SSD drives, I won't repeat everything I've read and try to appear as an expert. I'm certainly not.

All that being said, I recently (2 weeks ago or so) upgraded my Mid-2010 15" MBP to an Intel 320 SSD, and it's been running like a champ, even after reinstalling OS X several times. Granted, the controller in the Intel drives are different than what is in the Kingston, so my experience should be taken with a grain of salt. What I do personally, is let the system sit idle for a bit every so often, so the garbage collection has a chance to do it's job.

Basically, it's up to you. If you feel uncomfortable with an SSD under Snow Leopard, then wait for Lion. No harm in waiting if it keeps you from worrying about it. If you want to chance it, then that will probably be fine too. I doubt there would be any long-term damage to an SSD from lack of TRIM, just potentially decreased performance over time...of which, the degradation will likely still give you speeds above any you can get from a platter-based drive.

Personally, what I'd do is, set up the SSD in your system, clone it from your old drive, leave that old drive in the enclosure, and just try it out for a bit. Lion will be out probably within a few weeks, and if you decide you don't want to risk it, just swap it back out and wait.

*edit*

Also, sorry for the snippy replies earlier; I was in the midst of a 3-day Adderall withdrawal and posting on about 4 hours sleep. Makes me cranky, and rather thick-skulled. Again, apologies.

 

Any idea why the Apple SSDs benchmark so much slower than other off-the-shelf drive?

 

This means that I can go ahead and perform the upgrade. Thank you so much KCETech1. And this will not in any way shorten the life span of the SSD? What is with the SSD getting slower then over time, is it because they have to erase data before writing it? But I can not see this shortening the life span.

 

No problems at and thanks for being so polite and so informative. I do really appreciate your care and concern.

 

cheaper drives with slower RAM and controllers. OSX is also not yet optimized to work with SSD's I figure. SSD transfer rates on my MBP 17" is 30% slower in OSX than win 7 in 4k read and write speeds. MBP 13" is closer to 25% ( same make and controller, different sizes )

 

I don't see a point in waiting until OS X Lion comes out anyway since you still have to go through Snow Leopard to upgrade to that. Apple isn't releasing Lion in a stand-alone DVD package. You must go through the Mac App Store to obtain Lion, there is no getting around that unless you buy a new MBP that came pre-installed with Lion (which, I'm presuming, will come with a Lion re-installation DVD but it will only work with that particular system). So go ahead and slap that SSD in there with Snow Leopard running since you will have to do that anyway even after Lion comes out.

Right now the big rumor is also that you can't perform a clean install with Lion. The "e-mails" from "Steve Jobs" (I put those in quotes as you can never trust anything you read online) make it sound like Apple wants people to use their Snow Leopard DVDs to perform a clean install and then upgrade to Lion again. Kind of crappy but MS has been that way with their upgrade discs for a while. I just wish Apple didn't start going down that path as I was going to perform a clean install with Lion.

 

Thanks a lot kornchild 2002. Appreciated.