Comment by ZeroConcerns

3 months ago

I've pretty much stopped using 'stick' type storage for anything >256MB, as regardless of brand and series, my experience is that these thingies overheat under anything but light write usage, and either slow to a crawl or drop off the USB bus entirely before my copy is finished.

'Credit card' sized SSDs are not that much more inconvenient to carry and store, and don't exhibit any of these issues for me.

And the thermals on these things must be horrible, plus the label makes it look like a knock-off: Sandirk?

64 comments

ZeroConcerns

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nolok  3 months ago

NVMe enclosure are cheap, mine is a ugreen supporting usb 3.2 gen2 and i paid less than 20 euro. Put any kind of half decent nvme in it covered by one of those cheap heat dissipator.

  • plorg  3 months ago

    And not for nothing, the SSDs that GP is describing are exactly this - NVME sticks with a USB/Thunderbolt interface and some kind of usually aluminum enclosure with a layer of thermal conductive material.

  • varispeed  3 months ago

    How do you deal with chronic removal of drive before unmounting?

    Are there any enclosures that hold charge to prevent data corruption in an event of sudden removal?

    • Modified3019  3 months ago

      Dockcase makes enclosures with a capacitor that hold ~5 or 10 seconds of charge, and on power loss sends whatever the “get ready for shut down NOW” signal is to the contained drives. This obviously doesn’t help with unsynced data that the OS had not sent to the drive yet. I use one for a ventoy install, an another for a windows to go install. Windows on a usb stick is finicky to get recognized as bootable sometimes (likely a combination of hardware and software), but otherwise works well when it’s up.

      https://www.dockcase.com/collections/ssd-enclosure

      One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with

      3 replies →

  • abdusco  3 months ago

    Any recommendations for >20gbit/s enclosures with passive cooling (that are also not huge)?

    I have a 10gbit/s enclosure and a 4TB gen4 nvme in it. It pains me to know that it could achieve >3GB/s write speeds but hindered by the interface.

  • m463  3 months ago

    sort of related, but I really like the Sabrent PCIe 5.0 nvme enclosures.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQZ6SYD1

    No tools to insert m.2 nvme stick, easily fits and locks into a pcie slot, without a metal bracket to unscrew/remove.

    I don't have a pcie gen 5 system, but the new samsung drives might do 14,800 MB/s

    I also love thin ethernet patch cables. and 5-in-1 usb cables for travel.

    • jasomill  3 months ago

      I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly.

      It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.

      At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.

      I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.

kawsper  3 months ago

The most irritating thing about the credit-card sized ones, are how they aren’t attached if you move around.

I like to be mobile, so I put some velcro ultra-mate on the back of my laptop, and also on my disk, then the disk can be attached and plugged in while I move around.

I also got a 90-degree USB-C cable for a more direct cable route.

  • ssl-3  3 months ago

    Is this what we get when we stop making laptops with upgradeable internal storage?

    • ZeroConcerns  3 months ago

      I just upgraded the internal storage of my Lenovo T14 (AMD, Gen6) to 4TB, and that took all of 5 minutes. And that laptop was definitely made in 2025, although I agree that consumer sentiment overwhelmingly favors models that are less convenient in that respect.

      3 replies →

    • zamadatix  3 months ago

      I still utilize large external drives on my laptop with upgradeable storage, so we get it either way.

    • jack_tripper  3 months ago

      Not really an issue outside the Apple ecosystem and a few fringe tablet hybrids like from Microsoft. Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.

      2 replies →

  • blfr  3 months ago

    What do you do with all that storage?

    Here's the root partition (well, lvm) on a laptop I have been using for over three years now

        » df -hT ~
    Filesystem                Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root ext4  869G  298G  527G  37% /

    I do have an external drive for backups and another for drone footage but this is it. Everything else is either fast enough in the cloud or just here.

    • kawsper  3 months ago

      I record video in raw, so it’s mainly dealing with video files during editing.

      I want to see if I can move to prores in my import step, but I haven’t found a good workflow that allows for that.

  • saltcured  3 months ago

    This reminded me of my professor's laptop with a Ricochet wireless modem attached in much the same way back in the early/mid 1990s. That was an early wireless ISP prevalent in the SF Bay Area.

omnimus  3 months ago

Even smaller and faster are nvme enclosures over thunderbolt. Easily can be boot drive.

  • transpute  3 months ago

    Any recommended enclosures that work reliably with Linux?

    • nerdsniper  3 months ago

      These days most of them seem to work just fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I use several brands across all 3 and never had an issue. I like the DOCKCASE Visual Smart ($40) or Explorer Edition ($50). They have large capacitors to provide 10 seconds of power loss protection, support 10Gbps USB speeds, and have a second USB port just for power which makes it compatible with SSD's that draw a lot of power. I like the info on the little screens because I swap SSD's in/out frequently. There are cheaper ones that work fine too - the "SABRENT USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure" ($30) is nice for, well, not needing a screwdriver to swap out the drive - but it might not deliver enough power for some overkill SSD like the (now Sandisk) WD Black SN8100 - but the DockCase will, as long as you also plug in an auxiliary power USB cable.

      A drive like the Patriot Memory P400 Lite is very low power, so it works with cheaper enclosures or USB ports that don't deliver as much power to the peripheral. It also generates less heat, which can help sustain performance depending on the enclosure and environment.

      8 replies →

    • smallstepforman  3 months ago

      When you say Linux, reliability depends on distro. I had tried to install Mint on an external harddrive, and the stupid installer modified the boot loader to search for Grub on the removable disk. No removable disk, no grub, no booting of any OS. Idiotic. Lets not get started on the repair/recovery process since another mainstream OS recovery tools wont mount Fat32 EFI partition in R/W, needed to verify the uuid for bootmanager.exe - long story short, had to reinstall everything. Note - neither Windows or Linux are on that box anymore, but Haiku and OSX works brilliantly.

      3 replies →

  • whatevaa  3 months ago

    No need for thunderbolt, had good experience with good old high speed usb.

    • RamRodification  3 months ago

      I have to admit I still don't really know what thunderbolt even is. I think it's something that is done over USB-C, and requires hardware support on the CPU.

      I'm guessing it's one search query + a one minute read away though. I just haven't.

      4 replies →

LargoLasskhyfv  3 months ago

I've always wondered about why those little gadgets don't come with metal encasings bonded to the chip with a thermal pad, or putty out of the factory. Be it brushed aluminum, copper, or another alloy. Brushed, anodized, or with fins for 'heavy duty (outdoor/industrial?)' use(which you could clean with a brush, if need be).

There should be a market/demand for that, when people are paying fantasy prices for gamified crap, yes?

  • izacus  3 months ago

    They do? But that just means that my Transcend USB stick, made from aluminium, just heats up to 60C which makes it very hard to remove after writing without burning your fingers :(

    • LargoLasskhyfv  3 months ago

      Interesting that you mention that brand :-) I had some of them long ago, and they didn't last long. The true metal enclosure was just that, with the 'board' just held in place by the USB-part, and some pins from the other end. No thermal pads, or putty.

      The other one was just metallic painted plastic.

      That was the era of 512MB to 4GB. Never bought again from them.

Yokolos  3 months ago

I have two SSK USB sticks that give me write speeds of up to 1GB/s (as long as they're not filled to the brim). I've copied things like 80GB games in something like 2-3 minutes. A real SSD will always be best, but I'm pretty happy with these USB sticks.

  • jack_tripper  3 months ago

    The USB sticks you talk about are basically USB SSDs, not what we know as traditional thumb drives.

    I have a similar one too from HP(PNY), and it's crazy fast for its size, but the issue is its controller (ASMedia IIRC) reports it to the OS as a UAS (USB Attached SCSI), similar to an external HDD, instead of Removable Mass Storage as most thumb drives do, so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it, and that controller seems to be backlisted by the Linux kernel for some reason, so it's not recognized on linux unless I fiddle with the "options usb-storage quirks" kernel parameters, but even so my BIOS can't detect it to boot from it. From what I understand the issue causing all this is that it's a native 4K-block device causing issues with booting on it as typically 512-byte block native devices are required for EFI boot, or at least that have 512-byte emulation support which this controller does not.

    I am so disappointed because I bought a fast USB SSD to install and dual boot Linux on it as a second drive for my Windows laptop. If only I knew that there's such a big difference in the types of USB drives out there and that they're not all remotely the same.

    So do your due diligence on linux compatibility, if you ever want to buy these USB SSDs.

    • Yokolos  3 months ago

      I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it". If I use it in Windows or Linux, I can eject it like I can any standard non-SSD USB stick. I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically? I've seen some messed up BIOS's that simply defy all expectation in how they work. Then again, I primarily only use these things to transfer data between machines (primarily games), so all I really care about is their performance.

      I also preferably call them USB sticks instead of SSDs, since afaik TRIM isn't supported on them, which makes them significantly worse than any proper SSD.

      4 replies →

aidenn0  3 months ago

The SanDisk Extreme Pro is the best I've found for USB sticks (not to be confused with the "Extreme Go" which looks very similar and sucks). Just be aware that there are a lot of knockoffs, so be careful of where you source and test the speed of a large file copy (along with checksumming the contents) right after purchasing. The real drives always have a metal enclosure as well, which helps.