Bought an enclosure and 250GB M.2 drive for a FAST portable storage device.

[paddy-stone]

So as title really. Got fed-up of buying supposed fast flash drives claiming to have upto 300MB/s... some of them got close with the read speeds, but write speeds could be abysmal, sometimes as bad as 30MB/s write speeds on average, so the troughs could sometimes be as low as 12MB/s. So decided to get a proper FAST solution.

 

Components:

• Crucial MX500 M.2 SATA SSD 250GB

• Transcend TS-CM80S M.2 Solid State Drive Enclosure Kit

• Ugreen 1 Metre USB 3.1 Type C to Type C cable (10Gbps)

 

Please ignore the poor quality pictures, I was pressed for time... I may re-do them when/if I have time in the future.

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B077SL4FZG/

£40.79

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N4EUXCU/

£20.30

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0793MG1GK/

£9.99

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Total cost £71.08

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You don't actually NEED the cable, as you get a USB 3.1 type A to USB 3.1 type C cable in the box. But I wanted/need one anyway for ease of use.

 

 

 

Benchmarking:

 

 

 

The numbers speak for themselves when compared to a USB flash drive, that would cost approx only £10 less than I paid for this for the same capacity.

 

Real world numbers test:

 

Write speed: tested from Samsung 970 evo to the m.2 caddy a 26.3GB file.

 

 

 

26.3GB / 86 secs = 305.81MB/s actual transfer rate. I didn't get the read figures on camera, but they were slightly higher than the write figures at approx 340MB/s or so.

 

 

So, in conclusion this was a damn nice buy, at only £10 more, or for the exact same price as a 256GB flash drive if you don't need the extra cable... and the differences in speed as brilliant. This will make it so much easier for backing stuff up quickly, or chucking a few movies on for the day if I have to go out and such

 

Small files were pretty good too, backed up my dropbox folder in 10 seconds using freefilesync.

 

[Slottr]

Shit, thats not bad. I'm gonna have an extra M.2 laying around after a laptop upgrade so this might be the way to go

[paddy-stone]

3 minutes ago, Slottr said:

Shit, thats not bad. I'm gonna have an extra M.2 laying around after a laptop upgrade so this might be the way to go

Yep, that's what I WAS going to do too after I upgraded to the 970... but decided to keep the 250GB SATA m.2 I have in the PC for VMs etc instead as I ALWAYS run out of usable space.

 

In fact I bigger capacity SATA m.2 drive would be even better value, you can pick up a 1TB for a little over £100 or so.

1 minute ago, gorgonzola5000 said:

Awesome work dude! I'll consider doing something just like you did if I ever need a USB drive in the future

Thank you... yes I am very happy with it so far

[Mr.Humble]

Looking great, and the price difference is very appealing.

 

Not to rain on your parade, but how does your solution stack up price-wise to a traditional external SSD like Samsung T5?

Can the Transcend enclosure handle PCIe based M.2 SSDs? Or is it SATA only? Ye Vojta really nice work reading the text on the picture, please disregard.

[Snipergod87]

Thats slightly faster than my 128GB USB 3.0 Corsair Drive from years ago but much larger physically and in capacity.

NVMe drive would not work unless someone has build a NVMe to USB enclosure.

[Mr.Humble]

6 minutes ago, Snipergod87 said:

Thats slightly faster than my 128GB USB 3.0 Corsair Drive from years ago but much larger physically and in capacity.

NVMe drive would not work unless someone has build a NVMe to USB enclosure.

Someone did: https://i-tec.cz/en/produkt/tb3mysafem2-2/

 

But it's like 120£

And it's actually TB3

[paddy-stone]

4 hours ago, Snipergod87 said:

Thats slightly faster than my 128GB USB 3.0 Corsair Drive from years ago but much larger physically and in capacity.

NVMe drive would not work unless someone has build a NVMe to USB enclosure.

Really, you had a USB 3.0 flash drive that would do around 320MB/s in real world read.and write speeds?

 

TBH I haven't tried ALL USB drives, as some are pretty expensive and was hesitant to buy because of being stung by previous claims of manufacturers "up to" speeds and not coming anywhere near those speeds... which is why this was more appealing to me. It's slower than when the drive is mounted in the M.2 slot on a  mobo, considerably in fact as this drive should get speeds of around 550MB/s read/write internally. BUT, this is a much better portable solution for speed than I have previously enjoyed.

[paddy-stone]

Just copied over 18GB of music files, mostly mp3 320kbps from my server, took about 90 seconds approx, was getting around 240-300MB/s - This is exactly why I decided to do this really, handy for those times when you just want to copy over some new music or soemthing to take with you last minute before you leave for work or whatever and don't have time usually. I sometimes don't have network access when out and about because of the spotty transmitters in my are that have dead spots, and TBH if available I would rather play it locally on my devices, than to stream... I leave the streaming/net bandwidth for those really boring times when you NEED net/home access because of boredom

 

Anyway, hope someone liked this and inspired them to do something similar than wasting money on those false flash drive claims.

 

[Murasaki]

Wow this really makes me want to get rid of all my flash drives and use an M.2 SSD  

 

Edit: I found the same enclosure kit on a local site why you do this to me 

[paddy-stone]

I've been testing for a few days now and while it still has it's own problems, such as seeming to throttle sometimes on very large downloads and only get 200MB/s or so... it's still way faster than most USB flash drives. Majority of the time I get around 320MB/s average... it doesn't get TOO hot as I have been monitoring the M.2 drives temp during transfers, gets to about 55C at times, but that's the same as my NVME drive on the PC, and shouldn't be throttling. So might be something else going on here other than throttling.... it's fine if you do consecutive transfers of eg. 4GB each or whatever and does them mostly in the upper range of 300MB/s +

 

I actually had a HOLY SHIT! moment - wanted to copy a single file of around 175MB, pressed copy and seemingly nothing happened, so I checked the drive, and it was so fast that it didn't even bring up the transfer window

I re-created this with another file and same thing happened.

 

I feel vindicated in my purchase of these, it does exactly what I want more or less... to transfer lots of little files very fast, and also for the bigger files that I might want in a hurry to be portable. I am enjoying the shit out of this

 

[paddy-stone]

On 12/30/2018 at 9:54 PM, Mayushii said:

Wow this really makes me want to get rid of all my flash drives and use an M.2 SSD  

 

Edit: I found the same enclosure kit on a local site why you do this to me 

Sorry didn't get a notification, or if I did I must have glossed over it, I apologize.

 

You're welcome   - I can't think of a reason NOT to do this personally, except if you are very tight for space for carrying things... but even then the volume of this device can't be more than about 2 pen drives. And the cost is almost the same if you disregard the purchase of the enclosure, at £40 for 250GB m.2 drive. Let me know how you get on with it if you do go through with it please.