3 ms·
Thankfully NVMe enclosures are dirt cheap now, so if you can deal with a little more bulk you can adapt an SSD from any reputable manufacturer into an extremely
by jsheard 3y ago
Thankfully NVMe enclosures are dirt cheap now, so if you can deal with a little more bulk you can adapt an SSD from any reputable manufacturer into an extremely fast and reliable USB drive. Ideally look for an SSD with onboard DRAM though - drives without their own DRAM typically borrow memory from the host instead, but that trick doesn't work over USB, so their performance is degraded.
- choilive 3y agoI feel like this is not ideal for an external enclosure. Sudden power loss could lead to corruption and data loss if the data is buffered in DRAM.
- jsheard 3y agoIt will depend on the SSD controller, but AFAIK the DRAM usually isn't used for write caching. It's used to hold a copy of the bookkeeping structures which map virtual block locations to physical flash locations, which are mirrored on the non-volatile flash anyway, but are much quicker to random-read from DRAM. If you use a DRAM-less drive in a situation where it can't DMA host memory, such as in a USB enclosure, it has to read those structures from flash on-the-fly which is obviously slower.
- walterbell 3y agoCompact aluminum enclosure for 2242 SSDs isn't much larger than a USB drive, https://www.amazon.com/ElecGear-2242-Hard-Enclosure-Magenets/dp/B082CFQYKR/ https://www.amazon.com/ElecGear-2242-Hard-Enclosure-Magenets...