UGREEN M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps NVMe External Enclosure, Aluminum Tool-free Hard Drive Enclosure Support UASP & TRIM, NVMe Pcie Adapter for M and M&B Key in 2230/2242/2260/2280 SSD

Product Information

This may take a moment to complete, I recommend expanding the window to full screen for easier reading.

Kingston's DataTraveler Max was introduced in August 2021 as a USB-C flash drive capable of hitting 1GBps speeds. The claimed performance numbers justify calling the thumb drive as a portable SSD. While Kingston did not publicly disclose the internals of the drive, the form-factor and performance numbers point to the use of a native UFD controller. Kingston is not the first to the market with such a high-performance portable SSD. Crucial's X6 (updated in 2021 with Phison's U17 UFD controller) reaches speeds of 800MBps+, but it retains the industrial design of the older version (which was a SATA drive behind a USB - SATA bridge). NVMe SSD performance is limited by the USB 3 interface rather than the SSD specifications, using high performance NVMe SSDs with poor thermal management is not recommended. On others, though, the connector might be a Micro-USB Type-B, which is a flat, wide connector that is different from any USB port you'll see on a laptop or desktop. However, I wanted to find an enclosure for an NVMe drive that would provide the best speeds possible. I have the pciex1_gen=3 part commented out above because Raspberry Pi allows you to tweak the bus speed (you can choose Gen 1 for 2.5 GS/s, Gen 2 for 5 GS/s, and Gen 3 for 8 GS/s), but the port is only rated for up to PCIe Gen 2 speeds.Microsoft SQL Server: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/01/13/sql-server-new-drives-use-4k-sector-size.aspx

In addition to 640MBps, you'll also see USB 3.0's theoretical data rate described as 5Gbps. (That's gigabits, not gigabytes, per second.) You also may see this interface dubbed "USB 3.1 Gen 1" or "SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps" (in practice, all three are the same thing), to differentiate it from "USB 3.1 Gen 2" or "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps," which raises the ceiling to (you guessed it!) 10Gbps. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is the latest version widely available in consumer external SSDs at this writing. PCIe external SSDs can take advantage of the extra 5Gbps of bandwidth, but you need to have a USB port that supports the spec to see the extra speed benefit. (And yes, we are talking about "USB 3.1" as opposed to "USB 3.2." Bear with us.) There’s also a small, built-in battery that provides 5-10 seconds (depending on which model you get) of service time in the event of a power failure. That brief window of time might be enough to allow the drive to finish writing some data and avoid corrupting your drive in the event of an ill-timed unplugging. The Crucial X9 Pro is a competitively priced, highly portable external SSD that should appeal to most anyone. The X9 Pro is great for travelers, or indeed anyone who wants a fast, reasonably rugged and secure portable SSD.

Further reading

Unfortunately, I’m unable to find an upside to the Argon ONE NVMe expansion board. The power consumption is higher and the storage performance is significantly slower, despite the claim that from ASMedia –“Support BOT and UAS Protocol” and Argon40–“Argon ONE M.2 is UASP Supported for the Raspberry Pi 4 which means you can maximize the transfer speeds of your M.2 NVME Drive.” my testing has shown that the board doesn’t use UAS Protocol, resulting in unexpectedly poor performance. The reason it doesn’t use UAS is that the board USB descriptors aren’t advertising that it supports it, it’s only advertising it as a bulk storage device which means the UAS Protocol can’t be used. Note: I'm using my fork of rpi-clone, because the official version has not merged NVMe support yet. As a fitness fanatic who loves running and cycling, I also have a keen interest in fitness-related technology, and I take every opportunity to cover this niche on my blog. My diverse interests allow me to bring a unique perspective to tech blogging, merging lifestyle, fitness, and the latest tech trends. Generally, the higher a drive's capacity, the cheaper it will be per gigabyte. But that's not always true; sometimes the very highest-capacity drives come at a per-gigabyte price premium. The basement for budget external SSDs is currently about 7 cents per gigabyte, mostly from second- or third-tier vendors. Calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives.