Comment by 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
These look cool but support only up to 4TB capacity? That feels like a super silly limitation. Do they plan to release anything with higher capacity support? Or maybe these would unofficially work fine with 8TB etc.?
2 replies →
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.
Highly recommend this site: https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...
It's key to get an enclosure with a chipset that will support whatever interface your computer actually provides, otherwise a lot of these enclosures will fall back to USB-3 speeds for compatibility and things will be slow. This site gives a pretty good overview of the chipsets out there and pros/cons of each one.
I've had good experiences with Acasis[1] enclosures - they seem have a lot of aluminum surface area for dissipating heat - but I get the feeling that a lot of these things are very similar in practice since they're just slapping the same chipsets into different boxes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-Aluminum-External-Support-C...
+1 for that Acasis. I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional >1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. I benchmarked it with DiskMark64 and speeds are as expected for 40Gbps-class xfer.
It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
This one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008555989592.html
Not small, but not huge either. More importantly, it gets about 3/4GB/s with a Kingston NV3 4TB drive and very acceptable temps.
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.
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.
And they are fast