> Drive Specifications Matter (Complete)

This post consists of both "Drive Specifications Matter" articles from UNREDACTED Magazine Issues 011 and 012, plus updates. In previous posts, I have discussed drive speed limitations as an important factor when considering docks and adapters. This also applies to any external drive. With so many options, such as Thunderbolt 3/4/5, USB 2/3.2 Gen 2/3.2 Gen 2x2/4, PCIe Gen 2/3/4/5, and SATA I/II/II, finding the fastest and most affordable way to add storage to your devices can be quite difficult. Marketing and hype around a product's speed often disappoints users when they find out their reality does not match Amazon reviews. Supporting 40Gbps and actually accessing data at that speed can be two very different things. The goal of this article is to break down the vital differences to provide fast storage for your specific needs. First, let's discuss pre-built external USB drives. I have used SanDisk Extreme USB SSDs for many years. In one book, I discouraged users from purchasing the more expensive "Pro" variant since most computers at the time could not take advantage of the speed boost. That has changed with newer ports being more common now, but I still don't recommend them. We can do so much better today. Consider the standard SanDisk Extreme drive. This USB-C SSD has impressive speed for an external. It has the USB 3.2 Gen 2 protocol. The Pro variant has the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 protocol. That minor change has a drastic effect on the advertised speed of almost 2000 MB/s, but it requires a Gen 2x2 USB port on your computer. My MacBook Pro M1 does not have that, so it falls back to Gen 2. On my machine, that spec bump made very little difference. These drives are quite dated now, and only recommended if you need an affordable way to copy data and stow it away. I prefer NVMe drives within USB-C enclosures. These small drives can be used as primary internal drives on newer motherboards or external access drives with an adapter. I swap mine around often. My Linux laptop can store two NVMe drives which allows me to truly dual-boot two secure full-disk encrypted systems. If I ever upgrade those drives, the old drives make for great external options. This is where specifications matter. Most modern NVMe drives are marketed as either PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 4. Gen 3 will possess a speed around 3,000 MB/s while Gen 4 will hit around 7,000 MB/s. However, you may not be able to hit those speeds. I placed a fast PCIe Gen 4 drive within a $20 10 Gbps enclosure and received the following results. The drive offered over 7,000 MB/s in my laptop as the primary drive, but I only get less than 1,000 MB/s when used as an external. This is because the USB enclosure only supports 10 Gbps (1,250 MB/s) as a theoretical maximum speed. I could have placed a much cheaper Gen 3 drive in this enclosure and received the same result. However, it is still faster than the prebuilt units such as the SanDisk options. We want to look at the advertised Gbps of the enclosure. Modern units are now offering 40 Gbps and 80 Gbps USB-C enclosures which will better take advantage of the drives we place inside them. There are numerous 40 Gbps (5,000 MB/s) enclosure available online. Most are new unknown brands and pricing is all over the place. I first tried the cheapest enclosures assuming they would work the same as any others. I was wrong. The two cheapest options were made by Rosewill and Maiwo. Each were about $40. Both had a loud cooling fan, but I was OK with that. Initial speed tests were positive with speeds as expected for this specification. However, both of them failed in real-world usage. My stress test was to copy over a 250 GB SQL database. After a few seconds of decent performance, the units became very hot and transfer speed dropped significantly. This is a common issue with cheap enclosures. The bottleneck was not the drive or the machine, it was the adapter itself. I upgraded to a Qwiizlab fanless USB4 enclosure (https://amzn.to/3OgrIub), which is pictured below, using the same 990 Pro NVMe drive (https://amzn.to/4qwf7Ar). You may notice some NVMe drives are $100 less than others (https://amzn.to/3ZAfLlG). Some are advertised at up to 5,000 MB/s while the more expensive units are 7,500 MB/s. Remember that 40 Gbps = 5,000 MB/s. The faster NVMe drive would do us no good in this test. A $200 2TB Crucial (https://amzn.to/3OENI1U) would also offer the same speeds in a 40 Gbps enclosure. In Thunderbolt 4, it provided the following result. On a different machine with a USB4 40 Gbps port, it provided the following. Let's compare this to the speed of my internal drive on a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip. In other words, we are achieving roughly half of the speed of expensive internal Apple drives by using a 40 Gbps enclosure and NVMe drive. 3,000 MB/s is really good. It is triple the speed we received with the 10 Gbps external SSDs. It is also the approximate speed I would have received with an internal Apple drive if I had not chosen a more expensive Pro chip. This fanless unit did heat up during file transfer, but it was no warmer than the units with loud fans. My large file had consistent speed throughout the transfer. Make sure you use the thermal pads which are provided with practically any NVMe enclosure. Notice the port and adapter advertised 40 Gbps (5,000 MB/s), but the speed tests did not deliver. This is because there is always overhead with actual usage. I do not believe you will ever achieve full 40 Gbps speed with a drive and port with that specification. I usually see results which are a little more than half of the theoretical maximum. Now that we had tested the Qwiizlab 40Gbps USB4 enclosure, I went back to test their 80Gbps option (https://amzn.to/3Nj3zD2). I inserted the same 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drive into the new enclosure and began my tests. The following image displays the device next to a Mac Studio computer. I first tried it on my aging MacBook Pro M1 Pro which only has Thunderbolt 4 ports. As expected, I achieved results similar to the tests with the 40Gbps enclosure within the magazine. This is because port specifications matter. That computer simply does not have ports capable of taking advantage of an enclosure offering 80Gbps. For that computer, a less expensive enclosure and drive would work almost as well. However, this was a much different story when connected to a more modern computer. I found the fastest computer in the office, a Mac Studio with a M4 Max chip and Thunderbolt 5 ports. First, I tested the internal 2TB drive for reference: This was standard for the large drive and Max chip. This gives me blazing fast access to large chunks of data on the internal drive. Next, I tested the external 80Gbps enclosure: I was shocked. I was getting faster speeds from an external, non-apple, drive than the overpriced Apple drive soldered onto the motherboard. I was skeptical at first, but larger data speed test were just as fast. I pivoted to my real-world test. I copied a 250 GB database from the internal drive to the external. There were no pauses or signs of throttling. In less than a minute, I copied over this huge database which would have taken 30 minutes on a portable USB disk. The device did get warm, but never hot. There is no fan, so it is important to attach the included thermal pad to the drive as explained in the manual. The catch: price. Like any other technology, the latest advancements will cost more than the previous generation. I once paid $500 for a 1TB, dual 3.5" SATA disk array many years ago. It was slow but offered unbelievable storage at the time. I now pay less than $100 for a 1 TB microSD card which is tiny and faster. Expect to pay just under $200 for an 80Gbps enclosure while the 40Gbps options will be less than $70. I suspect we will see these prices eventually drop, but it may be a while before we see 120Gbps drives emerge. We will need faster NVMe options before that can be a possibility, but I am thrilled with 7,000 MB/s in real-word use. Who is this for? Only people who have the need for the speed. If you have a computer with ports capable of 80Gbps or higher, then you might be justified in this upgrade. Since I move huge databases around often, I am now hooked on this enclosure. I was able to offload a terabyte of data from my internal drive to the external in approximately two minutes. It seems too good to be true. Identify your port specifications and only purchase hardware which will take advantage of the limits. If you start salivating over the latest NVMe speed capabilities, some advertising 10,000 MB/s, have a reality check on your limits. Your internal Windows or Linux NVMe port may not take advantage of those speeds, and the current enclosures on the market won't get you all the way there either. Also, don't eliminate the possibilities with those old spinning-disk drives you might have laying around. They still hold data and can be great to store backups or other data which does not need accessed often. I have a 4TB 2.5" drive which sits in a Qwiizlab Mac mini Dock & Hub (https://link.amazon/B093juR8R) under my Mac Studio (this hub was intended for the old Mini's which were once the same size as the current Studio). Both the hard drive and NVMe slots are restricted to 10 Gbps. The hard drive would never achieve anything higher anyway and the NVMe is used for a 500 GB backup. Neither need the speed. The backup NVMe speeds were as expected: Reality: My first hard drive was a 5400 RPM spinning disk which achieved 100 MB/s. The later 7200 RPM drives achieved 130 MB/s and the rich people who had SCSI drives were getting 150 MB/s. When I had an early SSD offering 480 MB/s , I was confident that was the end. I never imagined that we would get 20x those speeds on sold-state medium back then. I often remind myself of this when I start looking at the latest gadgets. We are truly spoiled. Disclosures: I am not affiliated with any companies mentioned within this article. I was not paid or asked to write this article. I receive commissions through Amazon affiliate links, but not directly from any of these companies.