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I have an ssd i pulled out of my old laptop and want to use it as an external storage. Which connector type does it support and which one would the best to opt for?

Hi, I have a Corsair Force series NVMe m.2 SSD 240GB 2280. I want to use it as a portable USB drive. I looked for an enclosure and found ORICO M2PF-P3 M.2 NGFF SSD enclosure. I have attached the photos. Would this enclosure support my NVMe drive ? Thanks

Hi all, Was wondering if I could pick the brains on this forum about 1.8” Micro SATA SSDs… Recently completed a buyback from a customer who had Dell blades with 1.8” SSDs. This format doesn’t seem to be particularly popular in the enterprise world, so I’ve tried using a few adaptors/converters on eBay but the performance is woeful…talking 500kilobytes a second (write/read). Which is at odds with 6G SATA! The ideal solution would be to mount these in a 2.5” enclosure, which could be accepted in a standard PC or install a tray for a server. Does anyone out there know of a solid converter or recommend any action with this these?

Hi all, I have an Orico External Enclosure that I've been using for a couple of Months. I have a 4TB Toshiba Drive installed and I'm receiving another 4TB Drive from them soon. I'm planning on using JBOD as the first Disk already has data on it. The Enclosure has settings for RAID and JBOD. I haven't changed it yet but I'll need to do it now. How do I exactly setup JBOD? Do I just turn it on and then wipe the second Disk then format it to NTFS? Or do I need to configure something within Disk Management? Thanks for the assistance.

I am trying to connect a WD Blue hard drive in a Vantec NexStar TX to my laptop. I believe I've installed the drive into the enclosure correctly, and I know the wires aren't at fault. I'm also confident my USB port works, because the light on the enclosure lights up when the enclosure is turned on, and turns green when connected to my computer. Also, other things connect normally via USB with no issues. I've gotten some help from a friend, and between different ports on my computer and ports on his, our computers simply don't recognize the disk. We've checked the support pages, and couldn't find drivers. WD says that might be the issue, but my drivers are up to date, and they provide no download. Everything support pages tell us to do, we have done or cannot do at present. My drive is 1 TB at 7200 rpm with 64 MB of cache, and the page for it is here. My enclosure is here. My computer is a Surface Book 3, page here. Specifically, it has a 13.5 inch screen, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage. I'm running Windows 10 Home, 64 bit. I have ensured everything was plugged in and turned on. I have tested and ensured that the external power adapter and the usb cord both work to some extent.

Hello, I have a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 which is setup as a SMB file server (a single external HDD over USB) and a Plex Media server. The data on the drive is not mission critical, but I'd feel safer knowing I had RAID redundancy. However since a Pi4 is a low power device, using software raid introduces a big performance hit, so I'm looking into hardware RAID options. There are multiple USB HDD enclosures that support RAID. This enclosure is one that has particularly peaked my interest because of its design and price (on sale atm): https://www.newegg.com/orico-3529ru3-dock/p/0VN-0003-001P0?Item=9SIA1DSB8V2618&Description=Dual HDD enclosure&cm_re=Dual_HDD enclosure-_-9SIA1DSB8V2618-_-Product&cm_sp=SP-_-370410-_-0-_-2-_-9SIA1DSB8V2618-_-Dual HDD enclosure-_-enclosure|hdd-_-6 My question is, would configuring this box in RAID 1 produce any problems for a Raspberry Pi? I'm assuming I would be able to just mount the drive(s) (it should just show up as 1 drive since RAID 0, right?) to my SMB share list and it should just work, right? Worried about potential driver issues on the Pi, this is a pretty large purchase that I would have no use for if it does not work.

Hello, I was wondering, since at least 1 of the employees I provide tech support to now has a new Lenovo laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD in it, I have realized that I have no way of interfacing with a drive like that when its removed from the laptop. Getting a M.2 NVMe/SATA enclosure is easy enough, just order one on Amazon. But what I was wondering is if there's an enclosure that's similar to a HDD Toaster, but for M.2 drives. I don't really see myself needing to clone NVMe drives, especially since I've moved all the employees I manage over to Microsoft 365. I also don't see myself doing that because all the current machines the other employees have are all using standard 2.5" drives.... but it would be nice to be able to clone M.2 drives. If there isn't something like what I'm describing, I suppose 2 individual enclosures would do the job. I think you get can get a nice one for like $25.

Hello guys I have a mini PC ASUS PN51 that's being used as a NAS. It has a USBC 3.2 gen 2 (20 gbps) slots in its front&rear that I want to utilize with a DAS like the QNAP TR-004. I want full speed so I searched (mainly in Amazon) for a DAS with 4 bays and only found a few with 3.1 gen 2 (half the speed) Is there such a beast out there? or should I compromise for 3.1 gen 2..?

I got this hard enclosure from used market it's working but i want to know why does it have DC port

Since USB 4.0 should support up to 40 Gbps what is everyone's thought on using external m.2 enclosures (at least for pcie gen 3 drives)? Assuming the usb bus isnt too crowded it would be nice for quickly transfering or even playing games on the fly. I think it would be useful in some instances, such as the LTT video where they are testing Arc GPUs with downloading games on 1 pc and transferring over to play on another. It could also be useful when upgrading storage such as gen 3 to gen 4 to take advantage of resizable bar and whatnot.

So, a few weeks ago, my dad brought home 21 1TB hard drives from his work who was just throwing them out. I want to put them in a raid setup, but not sure which would be the best option. I would also need something to put them in; my dad thought I could just put them in one of our old PCs but I don't think I can do that. I was looking online and couldn't see any enclosures that have even 10 bays so I looked at servers which was way out of my price range. I live in Canada so there are alot of things not available here that are in the states. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

To start off, I Imagine this will be quite a long post, it's somewhat of a rant, and I don't really need anything right now so it's going to immediately turn of lots of people. That's fine. I just wanted to hear some feedback regarding my experience trying to find server cabinets for a future project I have in mind. This is a place for discussion after all. So bear with me. So I have this idea right. It's somewhat a dream of mine and I've spent a long time thinking of how to achieve this even if it will take a few years. I would like to somewhat follow in Linus' footsteps after he completed Personal Rig Update 2015(2016) and successfully utilized Optical Thunderbolt to move his personal rig out of the same room as his peripherals. I have a similar idea to that, but on an entirely different scale. My idea is this: I would like to source a 24-42u server cabinet/ enclosure, a server rack-mounted 4u case(which I will get multiples of), and multiple runs of 100ft Optical thunderbolt cable. I don't know if I will be in the same house when I finally start working on this project, but the issue still remains. I would clear a space in the basement to place the server cabinet, build a new personal rig and a few other high-performance computers, and finally run the Optical Thunderbolt upstairs to a room where all the peripherals will connect to a breakout box. This system can apply to multiple rooms in the house running off different computers. Each desk basically acting as a sort of terminal to each respective computer. This will allow the computers 4u's worth of space for housing high-performance components while taking up that space somewhere else entirely(in the server cabinet in the basement). The cabinet will not just house computers; I plan to create a home lab with full networking and a NAS. I probably spent more time than I should researching components and solutions for future reference. I managed to find a couple great options for 4u rackmount computer cases that are compatible with the parts I would like to use and might even have room for water cooling. The last piece of the puzzle in my mind is a cabinet to house everything. I thought this would be the easiest part because server cabinets are standardised and don't vary much from model to model... right? Also price wouldn't be an issue because it's just fabricated metal, they oftentimes don't even come with rails, sides, a door, or even casters........... right? <rant> So as I've spent a long time researching everything that will go in the cabinet, I've also spent a long time researching the cabinets themselves. I Immediately hit a wall because I started to see a pattern with the price. "Why is an 18u open-frame rack more than $500US? It doesn't even have rails, sides, a door, or even casters." You can see where I'm going with this. I was somewhat surprised to find that sites like Amazon and Newegg didn't have a large selection, but that's somewhat justified because those are more consumer-centric sites. So I started looking at sites like: rackmountsolutions .net, xcase .co.uk, servercase .co.uk, racksolutions .com (not to be confused with rackmountsolutions .net), superlogics .com, ebay and even my local craigslist. At this point I started getting frustrated. I just wanna find a 24-42u standard 19 inch 25-30 inch-deep cabinet to house my hobby. I can envision the bomb cost for most of these cabinets being under $100. So what gives? I've read about a dozen times about how building a cabinet can be a better solution than actually buying one by a company that specializes in building them. Like, actually what the fuck. Is the only reason why cabinets are so expensive because manufacturers artificially inflate the price because only large corporations and data centers purchase their products? This can't be the only reason can it? There's no monopoly/ oligopoly with server cabinet manufacturers. Where's the competition? The only way to find reasonably priced enclosures that I've heard of so far is to find ones that aren't being used anymore; Surplus, unused, no longer needed, being sold for less than half their original value. And it's still kind of overpriced. I should stop. </rant> I'm interested to hear what others think of the situation and I'm open to suggestions regarding a better server cabinet solution, or a better solution overall with this project-in-the-making. Here's the cases I'm looking at: ARK IPC-4570 Black Nice design, built well, reasonable price. Rosewill RSV-L4000 Slightly longer, more fans, room for water cooling? Here's a cabinet I kinda like, too bad it's expensive: Tripp Lite 24U Blaaaaack, sweet-spot size, fully-enclosed, expensive :c tl;dr Why are server rack-mount cabinets enclosures so expensive?

For anyone out there who's gearing up to design their own case, but not sure where to start, Protocase's Christa (our Engineering and Design Services manager) has published a new blog post that goes over all of the basics of enclosure design. She covers metal selection, bending, cutouts/fasteners, welding and finishing. Hoping it'll be helpful for newcomers to designing custom cases. Have a read, and let me know if you have any feedback - good or bad.

Hello I have a Samsung 840 SSD which I salvaged from my old laptop, sadly I have no room for it in my new laptop as I have 2tb HDD and 960gb SATA SSD in there. But I just came here from watching a couple of LTT videos and it got me thinking. As USB type C can transfer at 10Gbps and SATA3 is limited to 6Gbps, the videos said that SSD capabilities surpass SATA's capabilities, the latter being the bottleneck. So if I put my SSD into a USB Type C enclosure, do you think it will be possible to get faster than SATA3 read/write speeds? My thought process is that although the interface of the drive is still SATA, it isn't transferring data through an on-board SATA connection, it is connected via USB, and I got the impression that the on-board SATA is what caused the bottleneck in transfer speeds. Thoughts? Thanks

Over time, with space requirements increasing with each incarnation of software, I have accumulate a number of drives, both internal and external in 2.5" and 3.5" for factor. This is now really bugging me as it has inevitably led to a rats nest of data and power cables both inside my PC and with the USB and power socket cables coming from the 3.5" external enclosures. I am trying to try and consolidate these down to a single power socket and a single USB 3.0 cable. I know this could be done via a NAS or JBOD enclosures, but both these option for 8 bay solutions are, in my opinion, overpriced and out of my budget. This is why I am looking for a DIY solution. I assume that a SATA power cable for multiple devices that usually come with a power supply can somehow be merged to give 8 SATA power connectors and then connected to a single cable running to a single power socket to plug into the wall? Similarly, I assume there is maybe a way to split a single USB 3.0 cable into 8 separate SATA data connectors to connect to the drives, resulting in a single USB 3.0 cable to connect to a PC, though some kind of SATA controller may be needed somewhere in the equation?!?! However, I have no idea where to start with something like this and would appreciate suggestions, thoughts and advice.

Hi, I have a 2.0TB WD Caviar Green (WD20EARX) in an Integral Sata USB 2.0/E-SATA external enclosure from Akasa. It served me well but I wanted to switch the DC outlet from European to US to not have to use an adapter all the time. When I saw on Amazon, the price difference between the 12V/2A DC power brick and a new USB type-C (3.1 Gen 1) case from ORICO (model 3588C3), I said why not? Upon reception, I switched my HDD from the old case to the new one, plugged it on my Windows 10 (Pro 64bit) PC and got a nice screen "Please format your HDD!!!" I got scared I lost my data, put it back in the old case and voila, everything is there, working as usual... I tried different USB ports on my PC (3.1 Gen 1 & 2, 2.0) and also on my MacBook Pro. Nothing... I contacted the vendor and they told me the only solution is to format. The thing is at the moment, I don't have another HDD that can contain that capacity. If it is the only solution, I will consider doing it but can someone explain to me why using another enclosure makes my HDD unreadable (become RAW)? This is something I have a hard time understanding. If you have a fix I will take it too If you need any other information, please let me know.

Hey guys! I've unscrewed the boom microphone from a Turtle Beach PX21 headset which had a broken earcup, and it's an extremely good microphone given the price point it's at. I'd like to make a custom little enclosure for it so it can be a mount-anywhere microphone, only problem is I'm not sure how I'd give it a USB interface; it has a mic+ and mic- wire, that much I observed while removing it from the little board inside the headset's earcups. Ideally, it'd be as easy as soldering the wires onto a cheap $5 board and boom, just make a little enclosure for it with a mounting point. Thoughts or any ideas for the little interface board so I can get a USB output from this bad boy?

Hi people of the Linus Land! I was wondering if anyone has any idea how to use NVMe SSDs as a portable, external solution around here? I have searched all corners of the internet and from the looks of things so far there are only M.2 external enclosures available from manufacturers and no viable solutions for the NVMe SSDs so far. I have two NVMe SSDs that I would very much like to be able to use externally on the go and with a proper connection, Thunderbolt 3.0 preferably, that allows for the near full saturation off the intended drive bandwidth. Any help is much appreciated.

so i have a bunch of 2.5" HD from junk laptops and a few 3.5" HD all of witch work but i would like to use them as storage so i was wondering is their a cheap connector from USB 3.0 or thunderbolt or firewire to multiple SATA connectors like 4 or 6, like just the pcb and connectors no enclosure required?

So i was looking for an adapter i could hook up to an SSD, and then to a PC. I searched: USB 3.1 Gen 2 type C to Sata converter, but quickly realised that none of theese had transfer speeds even remotely close to 6gb per second! I don't see why this would be either impossible or expensive. I wish my adapter to be futureproof because i see myself buying a really fast SSD in the future. Does anyone know of a product that can do this? Edit: I am an idiot and confused bits with bytes. I will go ahead and buy just some plain old thing. Thank you for your time.

Hello, I was wondering if I could get some recommendations on what the best configuration for me would be, to make a long story short I have acquired six 500GB 7200rpm HGST hard drives, and I would like to start using them to archive some of my work projects while also sorting my growing digital media library. My current computing setup is primarily Mac focused, however I also have a semi-retired gaming PC that I have turned into an Ubuntu 16.04 Linux box and have a Raspberry Pi 3 floating around. I am trying to figure out if I should RAID the drives in sets of two or four with something like the Blackmagic MultiDock, OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini or build the drives into a Linux server with something like the ICY DOCK HotSwap Cage. My main concern with doing something like the ICY DOCK is that it would immediately tie me into running a lot more equipment around the clock in order to get the solution I want, I haven't run the numbers on what it would total out to be if I build a server and just saturate all of my PCIe slots with PCIe SATA III controller cards for expansion down the road when I acquire more drives. On the flip side, is building a server even worth pursuing for drives of this nature since I am not actually gaining that much storage space in comparison to 3.5in setups, which is why I keep leaning towards something like the OWC enclosure or budgeting out and getting something like the Blackmagic. I'd love to see what you guys come up with since talking about digital storage is always an interesting topic to address. Thank you very much! -Benjamin

For more than a decade, our How to Design Custom Enclosures for Motherboard-Based Systems has been a solid resource for designers looking for guidance on things like mounting the board, vent cutout placement, PCI card tabs, etc. We recently published an updated version to make it more clear and even more helpful. Plus, we've made several key additions and changes: • Added Micro ATX boards to the document • Added height constraints • Changed mounting fastener configuration • Changed PCI slots so they don’t restrict protruding connectors • Added new detailed illustrations and diagrams I shared this as a reply to one particular thread earlier last week, but wanted to share it as its own unique post, in case it would help you on your next design. Check out the new version here, also available to download as a PDF. Happy designing!

Hello guys, I would like to know your opinion on the Orico 2 bay enclosure. Here's the link : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAMW42C2333&cm_re=orico-_-9SIAAMW42C2333-_-Product I see some youtube video about it ... they were positive... online reviews doesnt seems to have the opinion ... I would like to know your opinions on the matters ! Are there any better product under 100$ online !

Fellow Techies, Does anyone know of a good usb 3.0 enclosure that I can use for an internal 3.5" drive? I will be using it to transfer data from one pc to another, store data, etc. Thank you in advance.

I have a very old 2007 Macbook Pro 15" that just had its logic board go poof and I am looking to files off the 160GB 2.5" HDD. Anyone have any recommendations on what SATA to USB connector to use for the transfer? Should I just get the connector cable or is an enclosure worth the extra few bucks? Are there particular brands to key in on either to get or avoid?