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Is there any point in running a NVMe drive through USB?

P

Ploki

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Original poster
Jan 21, 2008
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I'm thinking of getting another non-critical blade SSD beside the Leidian + Samsung combo, and I researched enclosures and drives

Since the cost of nvme drive/enclosure is roughly 30-60% higher, and the performance difference is still severely hampered by the USB, is there any point of it?

Isn't it better to just go m.2 sata + cheaper usb3 enclosure, and on the other end, all in with a tb3 enclosure
 
That’s what I’m going to do. A USB3.1 enclosure with a SATA m.2 SSD which will give about 500mb/s on both write and read. About half the price of an NVMe plus TB3 enclosure.
 
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Depends on the prices. If NVMe drives are 400% faster for less than say 25% more cash, that’s hard to pass up. But if NVMe enclosures are $200 empty, that’s equally hard to swallow.

In which case, putting an NVMe drive into a cheap and slow enclosure for a year until faster options fall in price may actually make sense. Then you haven’t invested in a drive that can’t be upgraded later.

Assuming it’s compatible(?)
 
ElectronGuru said:
Depends on the prices. If NVMe drives are 400% faster for less than say 25% more cash, that’s hard to pass up. But if NVMe enclosures are $200 empty, that’s equally hard to swallow.

In which case, putting an NVMe drive into a cheap and slow enclosure for a year until faster options fall in price may actually make sense. Then you haven’t invested in a drive that can’t be upgraded later.

Assuming it’s compatible(?)
Click to expand...

LeeW said:
You will get some performance increase over standard SSD, whether that is worth it is up to you.

https://www.macworld.com/article/32...olt-killer-external-storage-with-caveats.html
Click to expand...

NVMe over thunderbolt I already have, it runs 2000mb/s write and 2500mb/s read.

was thinking of getting another one for storage, but thunderbolt enclosures are expensive (mine was 99$) and would rather do usb-c. but gen3.1 are expensive and NVMe drives are roughly 30% more expensive than m.2 SATA.

Just seems a waste to run NVMe over USB
 
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Let me know if you end up getting a SATA enclosure. I’m currently trying to decide on which one I’ll get.
 
When I get a new Mini, I'll probably supplement it by buying an nvme drive, and then putting it into a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure.

This should yield somewhat better speeds then a SATA SSD in a 2.5" USB3.0 enclosure (gen.1 v. gen.2)...
 
Fishrrman said:
When I get a new Mini, I'll probably supplement it by buying an nvme drive, and then putting it into a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure.

This should yield somewhat better speeds then a SATA SSD in a 2.5" USB3.0 enclosure (gen.1 v. gen.2)...
Click to expand...
Yeah, about 2x read and 1.5x write.

I'm still on the fence whether its worth it or not; the TB + NVMe drive is crazy fast and it doesn't cost much more than gen2+nvme
 
There’s a $40 enclosure for M keys (NVMe) and 3.1 gen 2. Pretty good price. If you’re going to use it mainly on a non-TB computer, might be worth considering. From what I’ve seen, at least here in Europe, there’s not a significant difference between the slower nvme drives vs the top of the line, so it’s not the biggest deal in price vs performance. I’d rather go with a full tb3 enclosure if opting for nvme drive.

But right now I’m probably grabbing a brand new 1TB m.2 SATA ssd for about $90 which makes it pretty hard to ignore when a 1TB nvme would cost over double that. In the end I’m mostly interested in lower latency and faster random read speeds for photo editing from the external drive and in that sense the gap between SATA m.2 and nvme m.2 is much much smaller.

Any suggestions on which enclosure to get though?
 
nampramos said:
There’s a $40 enclosure for M keys (NVMe) and 3.1 gen 2. Pretty good price. If you’re going to use it mainly on a non-TB computer, might be worth considering. From what I’ve seen, at least here in Europe, there’s not a significant difference between the slower nvme drives vs the top of the line, so it’s not the biggest deal in price vs performance. I’d rather go with a full tb3 enclosure if opting for nvme drive.

But right now I’m probably grabbing a brand new 1TB m.2 SATA ssd for about $90 which makes it pretty hard to ignore when a 1TB nvme would cost over double that. In the end I’m mostly interested in lower latency and faster random read speeds for photo editing from the external drive and in that sense the gap between SATA m.2 and nvme m.2 is much much smaller.

Any suggestions on which enclosure to get though?
Click to expand...

where did you find a 90$ drive in europe? The difference between slower NVMes (like Crucial P1) and SATA3 (Crucial MX500) is 165€ vs 199€.
If i found a sub100€ m.2 drive I'd not even consider an additional slow NVMe next to the Samsung i already have
 
It’s a private sale. So one time only deal. Look on the used market and you might find one yourself :)
 
Cheapest solution is a USB-C to SATA adapter. $3.6
https://aliexpress.com/item/USB-3-1...tibel-zu-SATA-III-HDD-SSD-2/32900931683.html?

usb-c-sat.png

Note: TRIM over USB(-C) is not supported in macOS.
 
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Fishrrman said:
This should yield somewhat better speeds then a SATA SSD in a 2.5" USB3.0 enclosure
Click to expand...

It will of course depend which SSD you get, but I'm seeing ~700/900 MB/sec write/read.

I would however remind people (as I've learnt the annoying way) that a lot of "USB" devices don't follow specs strictly or have incompatibilities. Case in point: just now I tried to give a comparison against a 2.5" SSD I have in a USB case (the case actually is 3.1G2 but it's plugged into a 3.0/3.1Gen1 port) and it hung, and the disk disconnected.

I also had to unplug and reconnect the NVMe enclosure (same brand) before macOS would recognise it, for that test.
 
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