4 ms·

Hmm interesting. So even though the physical connector with the two notches fits, the electrical signaling is wrong. Thats seems like a bad design no? All my de

Hmm interesting. So even though the physical connector with the two notches fits, the electrical signaling is wrong. Thats seems like a bad design no? All my desktops are on SATA so I am used to a situation where as long as the connector matches (ie, SATA or DDR notches) then I am good. I wonder if I have burned my SSD by plugging it in...i'll have to find a adequate enclosure to find out. Although if I have burned it, then maybe it could then damage the new enclosure...hmm >I wonder what the impact of it going over USB and the additional USB to PCI-E controller. You should probably see about getting a Thunderbolt enclosure so theoretically the PCI-E interface doesn't have to go through yet another translation, otherwise you'll probably just kill the performance you'd hope to get out of the SSD. Hmm, the machines I am testing on don't have USB-C thunderbolt. I'll have to look into this. So I can see raw bulk performance being limited by the USB bus but would 4k performance be limited as well? I thought this was a limitation of the Flash memory and SSD controller.

the8472 6y ago
> Thats seems like a bad design no? Yes, that socket is not standards-compliant. It should have been B-keyed. > Sold by SSK Direct > Business Name:Shenzhen Huajianli E-Commerce Co.,Ltd No surprises here.
- Answerawake 6y ago
  Is there a good brand of enclosures that I could rely on? I am not sure if this is a typical use case such that the big guys would manufacture an enclosure that's compatible.
  - the8472 6y ago
    NVMe is only primarily used for performance, attaching it to USB would negate the benefits. So you would have to look for a thunderbolt enclosure, assuming your PC has thunderbolt and those are rather pricy. USB to NVMe adapters do exist but I have no experience with them so I cannot recommend any.
vel0city 6y ago
When you're using the USB interface, there is some chip in between the actual SSD and your computer. USB doesn't directly handle reading and writing to SATA or NVMe drives, so software on your computer encodes it to go out USB, and then some chip takes that USB signaling and converts it to read/write to the SSD, and vice-versa. If the controller on the USB interface is poor quality, it may reduce the performance of the overall set up. I've had external regular SATA/USB enclosures have varying performance despite being the same underlying drives inside. On a simplistic view: SSD <--> enclosure USB device <--> USB chipset on your PC <--> your processor Compared to: SSD <--> PCI-e interface <--> your processor Also note that USB is by definition a bus. Multiple devices can live on that bus and contend for the same bandwidth. If your mouse and webcam and keyboard and USB WiFi adapter and what not are all on the same bus, activity on multiple devices reduces the max throughput you have available to your USB device. This (usually) isn't true with PCI-e, which (usually) has dedicated bandwidth between the device and the CPU. This isn't to discourage you from using this drive however you wish, just letting you know of potential pitfalls and challenges along the way. You may get the performance you wish from this, but the bottleneck of IOPS is far more likely to be limited by one of the chips in the USB path rather than the SSD itself.
- Answerawake 6y ago
  >When you're using the USB interface, there is some chip in between the actual SSD and your computer. USB doesn't directly handle reading and writing to SATA or NVMe drives, so software on your computer encodes it to go out USB, and then some chip takes that USB signaling and converts it to read/write to the SSD, and vice-versa. If the controller on the USB interface is poor quality, it may reduce the performance of the overall set up. I've had external regular SATA/USB enclosures have varying performance despite being the same underlying drives inside. Yes, I understand this. What I am thinking of is the overhead of reading and constructing each block from flash. Is this really limited by the USB controller capability(I guess theoretically yes since its in the chain?) or is it just limited by the Flash controller and typical USB controllers. I guess we can test a theoretical bottleneck by running an IOPS test and comparing it to official Benchmark numbers of that Optaine model. That way we can eliminate the USB controller if the numbers match up. This is the structure from what I understand. PC Host Controller<--->USB Controller(in the enclosure)<--->Flash Controller(On the SSD)<--->Flash chip(On the SSD). Is this wrong? So here with Optane we have a massively high throughput of small files but a lower throughput of large files. Is this scenario something that a USB controller would noticeably slow down? I have never tested this before. A regular SSD has lower throughput of small files in exchange for high throughput of large files(slower throughput but higher bulk transfer) which is noticeable if the USB controller was not up to the task (See most USB Drives which have this + flash controller on the same board) Basically the whole reason this idea came up in my head is that I notice that despite using high bandwidth drives to install clean Windows and Linux copies, I notice certain bottlenecks in the install process that I suspect are a result of many small files being copied/unpacked(either copying package files in Linux or unpacking the WIM in Windows). So that led to me wanting to benchmark a High IOPS drive and comparing it to low IOPS to see once and for all if the install process is choking on the drive vs something else (ie. the CPU capability for decompressing). Its just a weirdo side project that I wanted to try. Eventually I even wanted to somehow try a ramdisk type scenario although I don't think that sort of hardware exists. This is also motivated by the fact that I don't have a way to intercept the file reading process on the drive as they are being read to see if the drive really is the source of any bottlenecks or if its the installer code.
Rafuino 6y ago
BTW, the Optane drive you bought is limited to PCIe Gen 3 x2, so it won't get the full performance of a x4 Optane SSD (like a 900P, 905P, or P4800X). https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=97164,129834,135581 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro... for a comparison of the types of SSDs if you're curious.

the8472 6y ago

> Thats seems like a bad design no? Yes, that socket is not standards-compliant. It should have been B-keyed. > Sold by SSK Direct > Business Name:Shenzhen Huajianli E-Commerce Co.,Ltd No surprises here.

Answerawake 6y ago
Is there a good brand of enclosures that I could rely on? I am not sure if this is a typical use case such that the big guys would manufacture an enclosure that's compatible.
- the8472 6y ago
  NVMe is only primarily used for performance, attaching it to USB would negate the benefits. So you would have to look for a thunderbolt enclosure, assuming your PC has thunderbolt and those are rather pricy. USB to NVMe adapters do exist but I have no experience with them so I cannot recommend any.

vel0city 6y ago

When you're using the USB interface, there is some chip in between the actual SSD and your computer. USB doesn't directly handle reading and writing to SATA or NVMe drives, so software on your computer encodes it to go out USB, and then some chip takes that USB signaling and converts it to read/write to the SSD, and vice-versa. If the controller on the USB interface is poor quality, it may reduce the performance of the overall set up. I've had external regular SATA/USB enclosures have varying performance despite being the same underlying drives inside. On a simplistic view: SSD <--> enclosure USB device <--> USB chipset on your PC <--> your processor Compared to: SSD <--> PCI-e interface <--> your processor Also note that USB is by definition a bus. Multiple devices can live on that bus and contend for the same bandwidth. If your mouse and webcam and keyboard and USB WiFi adapter and what not are all on the same bus, activity on multiple devices reduces the max throughput you have available to your USB device. This (usually) isn't true with PCI-e, which (usually) has dedicated bandwidth between the device and the CPU. This isn't to discourage you from using this drive however you wish, just letting you know of potential pitfalls and challenges along the way. You may get the performance you wish from this, but the bottleneck of IOPS is far more likely to be limited by one of the chips in the USB path rather than the SSD itself.

Answerawake 6y ago
>When you're using the USB interface, there is some chip in between the actual SSD and your computer. USB doesn't directly handle reading and writing to SATA or NVMe drives, so software on your computer encodes it to go out USB, and then some chip takes that USB signaling and converts it to read/write to the SSD, and vice-versa. If the controller on the USB interface is poor quality, it may reduce the performance of the overall set up. I've had external regular SATA/USB enclosures have varying performance despite being the same underlying drives inside. Yes, I understand this. What I am thinking of is the overhead of reading and constructing each block from flash. Is this really limited by the USB controller capability(I guess theoretically yes since its in the chain?) or is it just limited by the Flash controller and typical USB controllers. I guess we can test a theoretical bottleneck by running an IOPS test and comparing it to official Benchmark numbers of that Optaine model. That way we can eliminate the USB controller if the numbers match up. This is the structure from what I understand. PC Host Controller<--->USB Controller(in the enclosure)<--->Flash Controller(On the SSD)<--->Flash chip(On the SSD). Is this wrong? So here with Optane we have a massively high throughput of small files but a lower throughput of large files. Is this scenario something that a USB controller would noticeably slow down? I have never tested this before. A regular SSD has lower throughput of small files in exchange for high throughput of large files(slower throughput but higher bulk transfer) which is noticeable if the USB controller was not up to the task (See most USB Drives which have this + flash controller on the same board) Basically the whole reason this idea came up in my head is that I notice that despite using high bandwidth drives to install clean Windows and Linux copies, I notice certain bottlenecks in the install process that I suspect are a result of many small files being copied/unpacked(either copying package files in Linux or unpacking the WIM in Windows). So that led to me wanting to benchmark a High IOPS drive and comparing it to low IOPS to see once and for all if the install process is choking on the drive vs something else (ie. the CPU capability for decompressing). Its just a weirdo side project that I wanted to try. Eventually I even wanted to somehow try a ramdisk type scenario although I don't think that sort of hardware exists. This is also motivated by the fact that I don't have a way to intercept the file reading process on the drive as they are being read to see if the drive really is the source of any bottlenecks or if its the installer code.

Rafuino 6y ago

BTW, the Optane drive you bought is limited to PCIe Gen 3 x2, so it won't get the full performance of a x4 Optane SSD (like a 900P, 905P, or P4800X). https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=97164,129834,135581 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro... for a comparison of the types of SSDs if you're curious.