- #Make samsung portable ssd the main drive portable#
- #Make samsung portable ssd the main drive Pc#
- #Make samsung portable ssd the main drive series#
#Make samsung portable ssd the main drive portable#
We wanted to give you a sense of what kind of speed is available with these M.2 enclosures, so we put a few of them through a standard CrystalDiskmark run, focusing primarily on sequential reads and writes, because roomy portable drives like these are used primarily for toting collections of large files. And if you happen to bump into it or hit it with something while it’s plugged in, you could potentially damage your device and / or port.
#Make samsung portable ssd the main drive Pc#
But depending on where your USB ports are, having a 4.3-inch-long metal enclosure sticking out of your PC with no flexibility can be inconvenient. That’s convenient in the sense that there isn’t an extra cable to misplace or leave behind. Keep in mind, though, that the shorter model can only handle 42mm-length drives, which are fairly uncommon in the US, and at the moment seem to top out at 1TB. That device is available in a trio of colors, as well as a shorter MS09-Mini model that’s even more pocket-friendly.
#Make samsung portable ssd the main drive series#
If you have an existing SATA-based M.2 SSD or you want to buy one because you don’t have faster ports or you don’t need the maximum speed to move your files to and from your drive, Silverstone sells a Mobile Series MS09 enclosure specifically designed for SATA-based M.2 drives. So if you don’t have a device with newer, faster ports (be they of the USB-C or USB-A variety), there’s no serious speed benefit gained by using an NVMe-based M.2 drive. That’s technically faster (by about 90MBps) than the top speed of a SATA-based drive, but with bus overhead and whatever else is passing through that USB controller, you probably won’t see a major speed benefit.
If you’re plugged in via a USB 3.0 / 3.1 Gen 1 port, the drive’s speed will be bottlenecked at a theoretical max of about 640MBps. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll need to be plugged into a desktop or laptop with a fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 port to achieve those higher speeds. You’ll Need Fast Ports to Benefit From NVMe Drives Still, nearly 1GBps of sequential read and write speeds is stunningly fast, especially if you’re used to moving large files around with an average old-school USB flash drive. Although, as we’ll see in testing, the actual speed you’ll see with these NVMe enclosures is only about twice that of SATA. Going that route, you’ll save yourself between $45 and $65, and wind up with a drive that’s capable of speeds of more than three times as fast in sequential (large file) reads and writes than that SATA-based SanDisk Extreme Portable drive can ever hope to be. But you can pick up, say, a 2TB Intel 660p M.2 SSD on sale for around $185 these days, along with an NVMe-based enclosure from MyDigitalSSD or Plugable for $30-$50. The drive inside it is SATA-based (like a regular-old hard drive), so its performance is capped at around 550MB per second (MBps).
For instance, the 2TB version of our current favorite portable SSD, SanDisk’s Extreme Portable drive, sells for about $280 online.