I used the exact same Samsung 970 EVO 500GB drive in each unit as my Time Machine backup drive attached to my Mac. Tripp-lite M.2 NVMe enclosure (ASM2362 chipset) Shinestar M.2 NVMe enclosure (JMS583 chipset) So, bumping this up because I've had a few months with to 3 different NVMe enclosures. Other-times that means yeah, I'll go with a slower product if its more reliable or does more things.
Sometimes that's the fastest thing on the market because its relatively low priced. I'm just the kind of person that feels that if I need something, I might as well buy the best bang for the buck thing I can.
So I needed the ability to shove the drive into an enclosure and access it. I work for a very large company and when an Exec wants that data, all the valid reasons in the world won't help you. I know that Dells ProSupport will repair the machine, but sometimes I don't have time to wait for them to come out. One of the major reasons I needed the external NVMe reader was so that if needed, I could pop the NVMe drive into an external case and decrypt/backup the data if the original unit failed, and not have to rely on having another laptop around I could stick the drive into. The newest Latitude, and Optiplex lines are equipped with NVMe drives now. But our newer hardware is USB 3.1 Gen2, and has NVMe drives now. Well yeah, the source can be a bottle neck.
That all being said, I've been using this one for almost a year - specifically for backup/transfer duties at home and have found its speed acceptable (minding that it is just USB 3.whatever gen 2, not Thunderbolt 3): Īt work we just use SATA SSDs in external USB 3.0/3.1 enclosures, which are also sufficient as long as your entire job is not only to be nonstop backing up one Samsung pro nvme drive (or the new PCI-E gen 4 nvme drives) after another for 8 hours straight. These are the standard drives in our last gen Dell laptops and desktops.ĭon't forget that having ultimate external drive performance won't help the source drive be any faster than whatever its interface is limited to. But the read/write speeds are still impressive for a true USB Thumb drive. Most of the time now they run various bootable things. These predate me having the USB External M2 adapters. Next is the fastest USB thumb drive I own. I was actually surprised at the speed this did. I have like 5 of these things with the WinPE builds on them so I can stick'm in a computer and do some IT magic. The Sandisk Ultra Flare 32GB USB 3.0 drive. Next is a fairly cheap and plentiful USB 3.0 drive. Thats not a mistake, the random write tests are slow low as to not even register. Thing was so damned slow I changed it to 512GB and only ran 1 pass. The USB's are of course simply USBs.Ĭheap PNY 8GB commodity drive. The SATA drives were all in a Startech USB M.2 SATA enclosure. I did a Sandisk Extreme 64GB, Sandisk Ultra Flare 32GB, Samsung EVO 850 1TB 2.5", Intel SSD Pro 2500 256GB SATA too. I actually did a bunch cause it I was a bit bored at work. I've been using a M2 Sata enclosure, but I also have 2.5" external cables that let me plug a 2.5" directly into a USB port. So the faster the drive is the faster I can complete these tasks. Then I'll replace the drive or laptop, re-image, and restore the salvaged profile. Generally if the drive is readable I'll boot off a custom WinPE disk I built and run USMT to salvage the user profile data to a compressed MIG store. The reason I am interested in the fastest one is that I often use an external drive for data salvage operations at work, and the faster that drive is, the faster I can backup/restore data from a non-booting laptop. Though for time I limited the run to 3 instead of 5. Yeah, thats pretty similar to the bench I did in the enclosure. I'll post those when I run the benchmarks. So I can do a direct compare of the drive internally installed vs the USB enclosure.
I'm actually installing Windows on these same drives right now, using the same laptop for testing. Even though the 970 is actually faster in most reviews where its directly plugged in. I did a crystal bench on a Intel 760p 256GB, and a Samsung 970 EVO and the two are basically identical. Supposedly this other SHINESTAR is capable of 2GB+, unfortunately its out of stock every I've seen. I've got a Shinestar NVMe enclosure, but it tops out around 1GB and I know these drives go faster when plugged directly into an M2 slot. I don't mind cables, I'm looking for the fastest damned USB enclosure for NVMe drives. Has anyone seen any good reviews? I've only been able to find a few that have any real benchmarks listed, and none of them are the by usual reliable websites.