expired Posted by pigdeal • Oct 19, 2021
Oct 19, 2021 3:19 PM
Item 1 of 5
Item 1 of 5
expired Posted by pigdeal • Oct 19, 2021
Oct 19, 2021 3:19 PM
WD - My Passport 1TB External USB Type-C Portable Solid State Drive - Space Gray $119 or Blue for $110
$120
$230
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Get a pc NVMe drive, which vastly-I mean vastly- outperforms standard sata SSD drives and blows Sata/USB external SSDs like this out of the water. There is a one terabyte drive available on the front page for about $110 (Links below)
Then go to Amazon and buy a NMVe USB (3.1 2nd gen!!) enclosure that has a usb-c connector. They start about $18 and up depending on what extra features you want in the enclosure. (And yes, there are even RGB enclosures, you dorks) (Link below)
Put A into B, then plug the enclosure into an available USBC socket on your computer, format and away you go!
The USB 3.1-2gen(3.2) standard has an upper limit of about 10Gbps. (Some usb-c ports on older PCS might be 3.1, which caps at about 1 GBps.) NVMe drives have a theoretical max speed of 32 GBps, and last time I checked, in real world tests higher-end $ PC NVMe cards can do read/write speeds around 7,000/1,800Mbps and lower end / older NVMe cards range around 3,800/1,200MBps.
By contrast, standard SSD drives using SATA 2/3 interface in a USB enclosure have a maximum theoretical speed of about 300MBps and 600MBps respectively. A high quality SSD, which you can only hope is in this USB portable drive, might have a good read speed of about 450MBps and maybe an optimistic 180MBps write when plugged into that same 10GbPs USB 3.2 port. Everything runs at the speed of the slowest component. Why would you want to buy components that run slow?
see where I'm going here? Spend an extra $20 or $30 and get the same capacity of storage that will be at least 7 times faster than this drive with a budget PC NVMe, and potentially up to 15 times faster with a higher NVMe if you choose to upgrade it. There are several NVMe integrated USB-C drives that you can buy, but almost all of them run at much slower speeds of around 800-1,400MBps. Unfortunately the models that do run at the higher throughputs are Waaaay above this price range ($300+)
Also, NVNe drives are MUCH more tolerant of high temperatures than standard ssd drives and that will help with reliability over time. If you ever had a USB portable SSD drive, you know that they get HOT if you write to them constantly for more than a few minutes at a time.
If you have a USB-c connector built into your PC or laptop then this should absolutely be a viable option for you. Even if you have a older PC and don't have a USB c connector built in, you can still use a data/power USB C-to-A adapter and use this on virtually any USB port, as the speed will only be limited by the slowest component, probably your computer! I regularly connect my usb-c enclosure to my cell phone and use it to transfer photos videos and movies back and forth. It reads / writes faster than the maximum speed of my phone and SD card, and so is able to transfer the files in the shortest time possible for my device.
That is the real goal, to have data storage that can manage and serve data as fast as your computer can utilize it. Historically data storage has always been the slowest operation in a computer and it prevented you from using the maximum power of your computer because all of the other components are idling while waiting on the hard drive to read or write data. When you remove that bottleneck, you'd be amazed how much faster your computer will run.
My last computer is a bit older and does not have a NVMe socket on the motherboard, but using an external enclosure connected to a 3.1 usb-c port I was able to use it as my boot drive by setting my motherboard to boot to USB. Now IT FLIES when loading up large programs and huge games. If I had known there was such a significant difference with having an nvme, I would not have bothered to build my current pc.
Links:
A couple current frontpage NVMe deals.
https://slickdeals.net/f/15340579-crucial-p5-1tb-3d-nand-pcie-gen-3-x4-nvme-internal-solid-state-drive-m-2-89-99-free-shipping?
https://slickdeals.net/f/15338497-1tb-sabrent-rocket-nvme-ssd-amazon-110-48-at-store4memory-via-amazon?
A search on Amazon for enclosures. There are tons of options available.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nvme+3...x=
Hope this info helps! 😎👍