The topic of external SSDs comes up a lot here. For anyone who is interested, I recently built one for myself.
-
I decided to use this internal NVMe SSD: Micro Center: Inland Performance 2TB 3D TLC NAND PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe M.2 Internal SSD. I paid $110 for 2TB of storage.
This is a mid-tier model. I selected it primarily for its longevity. The product claims to have an endurance rating of 3,600 TBW. I take these specs with a grain of salt, but this number is significantly higher than any other SSD I found.
Since I’m using a USB enclosure, I don’t require top-tier performance, since it’s all going to be throttled to USB’s 10Gbps data rate anyway.
-
Based on a recommendation from Linus Tech Tips, I chose this inexpensive USB enclosure: ORICO M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVMe PCI-E M.2 SSD Case.
The heat sink gets hot to the touch when under load, but the case dissipates enough heat to prevent thermal throttling. This weekend, I performed a torture test by compiling an embedded Linux distribution (generating a 1.4GB file system image). It took approximately 13 hours to complete. When pointing a fan at the drive (preventing it from heating up), it went only slightly faster (12:45, down from 13:15 - about 4%, well within the realm of experimental error).
Here’s the results of Crystal Disk Mark (run on a Windows PC):
Based on what I’ve seen from other NVMe-USB SSDs, this drive performs on a par with other drives for sequential 1M transfers, but falls a bit short for random 4K transfers. Which is about what I expected for a mid-tier inexpensive SSD.
And it’s more than an order of magnitude faster than the portable hard drive I had been using (which took over 24 hours to compile that same Linux distribution):
