Looking for a small, reliable external SSD

[raymanh]

As the title says, I'm looking for a 1 or 2TB external drive with speeds of around 10 Gbps. So I'm looking at NVMe USB 3.1 Gen 2 interfaced drives, I don't need the speed and price of Thunderbolt 3 interfaced drives.

I'm currently looking at the Sabrent Rocket Nano and the Sandisk Extreme Pro. I'm also considering getting a USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure and fitting an SSD myself. Pros for the Sabrent; small, cons; apparently overheats and slows down. Pros for the SanDisk; tough, no overheating, cons; large.

The most important thing here is reliability and sustained speeds. This will be my only back up drive so I need it to be reliable. Also I'll typically be transferring large files so I'd like to see decent sustained speeds between 500 and 1000 MBps.

Any suggestions or advice?

Thanks.

 

[Boyd01]

I have two 2tb Samsung T7's for my 2018 Mini. One is constantly connected for data storage, the other is a Carbon Copy Clone of the Mini's internal 2tb SSD. I went with Samsung since I have had three of their older T3 external SSD's working flawlessly for several years. One of them was used as an external boot disk for my 2012 quad Mini for a couple years.

This is the performance I get from the 2tb T7's on the 2018 Mini with USB-C.

 

[raymanh]

Thanks, I did consider the T7, but some fairly comprehensive tests showed it wasn't as good as the SanDisk, a Crucial, a Lexar and an OWC (all NVMe USB 3.1 Gen 2 interfaced SSDs).

TL;DR for the article, the SanDisk was the best.

 

[Fishrrman]

I put a Crucial 500gb nvme blade into an Orico USB3.1 gen2 enclosure.
It gives me reads of around 965MBps under normal load.

I have found, however, that if I "push it" into an extreme "heavy write load" situation, the speeds will slow down. But under my "normal usage" -- the drive contains several partitions that hold my CCC cloned backups -- it's fine. YMMV.

I've read that it's a part of nvme that under high loads (and the resultant high heat), that the drives will "throttle back" so as to preserve the integrity of the writes. Not sure about that, it would take someone who's more up on the "nvme specs" to describe how that works, IF it is built-into the specs at all.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I wanted something super fast I could run a Windows 10 Parallels instance off of ... so I did this:

SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SATA SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E SATA M-Key/(B+M) Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure Support UASP Trim for NVME/SATA SSDs 2242/2260/2280

SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SATA SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E SATA M-Key/(B+M) Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure Support UASP Trim for NVME/SATA SSDs 2242/2260/2280

www.amazon.com

and

SAMSUNG 970 EVO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe Interface Internal Solid State Drive + 2mo Adobe CC Photography with V-NAND Technology (MZ-V7E1T0BW), Black/Red

The Samsung 970 EVO SSD continues to lead industry standards with V-NAND technology for reliable and superior performance. The SSD that goes further, the 970 EVO accelerates into next-gen computing by transforming high-end gaming and streamlining graphic-intensive workflows with the new Phoenix c...

www.amazon.com

- I don't have the setup now (got a Windows desktop in March) but it was ... blazing fast when I had it. Got really hot too... but never had a problem with it slowing down. But that heat was enough to be painful. lol.

 

[ght56]

We've been buying the ADATA SE800 as of late. It's cheap, fast, small, durable, and reliable and it uses a good chipset, a good controller, and good NAND. It's a solid drive for what it is, and it has reasonably good performance even in sustained workloads. However, like most modern SSDs, it uses a cache and it does suffer from degraded performance after that cache is exhausted during extremely large writes.

Adata SE800 Portable SSD Review: Compact, Waterproof 10Gbps Storage

Adata’s SE800 is small, fast, and ready to go where you go

www.tomshardware.com

That said, as you mentioned you care about sustained performance, the Sandisk Extreme Pro is probably your best bet if we are talking specifically about available 10 Gbps externals (and further, IIRC it has good thermal performance in these sustained situations.)

(Finally, if sustained performance is of absolute critical importance and you are constantly going to be writing massive files, the Samsung 970 Pro or WD Black NVMe slaughter most everything else if you are writing files large enough, although this has more applicability if you are interested in eventually moving to a TB3 enclosure down the line and making full uses of these would necessitate an enclosure that excels at heat dissipation.)

 

[raymanh]

We've been buying the ADATA SE800 as of late. It's cheap, fast, small, durable, and reliable and it uses a good chipset, a good controller, and good NAND. It's a solid drive for what it is, and it has reasonably good performance even in sustained workloads. However, like most modern SSDs, it uses a cache and it does suffer from degraded performance after that cache is exhausted during extremely large writes.

Adata SE800 Portable SSD Review: Compact, Waterproof 10Gbps Storage

Adata’s SE800 is small, fast, and ready to go where you go

www.tomshardware.com

That said, as you mentioned you care about sustained performance, the Sandisk Extreme Pro is probably your best bet if we are talking specifically about available 10 Gbps externals (and further, IIRC it has good thermal performance in these sustained situations.)

View attachment 963368


(Finally, if sustained performance is of absolute critical importance and you are constantly going to be writing massive files, the Samsung 970 Pro or WD Black NVMe slaughter most everything else if you are writing files large enough, although this has more applicability if you are interested in eventually moving to a TB3 enclosure down the line and making full uses of these would necessitate an enclosure that excels at heat dissipation.)

Thanks for the diagram. The SanDisk seems like the best bet. It actually has a WD Black in it BTW.