Rich Freeman wrote: > On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 7:26 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm glad I followed that other thread. I feel a lot better about this >> method of storage. I'm also feeling better about USB and storage >> itself. I've been really nervous about that for a long time now. It's >> also pretty easy to copy media from my phone. >> > There is nothing wrong with USB3 for storage - it is plenty fast for > hard drives, but agonizingly slow for NVMe. I have 100TB of USB3 hard > drive storage working just fine on my Ceph cluster. > > Really, I think you're paying a huge premium to buy an M.2 NVMe only > to put it in a USB3 enclosure. If you can live with the latency of > USB3 then a decent quality USB3 flash drive is going to be WAY cheaper > and basically do the same job. I only use USB3 M.2 enclosures for > utility/maintenance purposes, like imaging an OS drive or doing data > recovery. If I'm buying an M.2 drive, it is because I intend to > mainly use it with 4x PCIe lanes all the way to the CPU. > > If you do need NVMe then the next question becomes consumer vs > enterprise grade. Those Samsung EVOs are fine for consumer devices - > if you're doing read-intensive work the latest gen ones can give you > incredible performance for gaming/OS/etc. The gotcha is that they can > only handle short bursts of writes before they slow down, and they > have low endurance by enterprise standards. They're good general > purpose devices. > > For my Ceph cluster all my flash storage is enterprise grade, mainly > for the increased endurance and power loss protection, which gives you > very fast syncing behavior (safely). That gets a lot more expensive > unless you buy used gear, which requires hunting around. > > That said, there is nothing "wrong" with buying M.2 drives just to use > them exclusively USB3 enclosures. I just think you're paying a big > premium for something that isn't really much better than a thumb > drive. >
I likely am paying a premium but this is also a learning experience, plus getting media off my phone. I plan to do the same for my Sis-n-law's phone too. She takes more pics than I do. I'm a bit of a hermit. LOL Those two things are things I've wanted to do a long time. Even tho the USB on my phone is slow, my puter USB isn't the fastest out there either, it is pretty darn fast. I suspect the biggest slow down is the small file sizes. I've watched rsync and such before. Small files are just slow to copy. Still, I'm learning and actually find this external m.2 over USB setup quite neat. Also, very large storage space compared to USB sticks. The biggest USB stick I've ever bought, 128GB. I haven't used it yet. It just sits on my desk. Remember that thread ages ago about a Raspberry Pi and a NAS box? Those used USB for the drives. At the time, I didn't trust USB enough to even think about spending that amount of money for storage that was over USB. Now, that could be a new idea. One I could be comfy with. I could build a Raspberry Pi for a NAS box, a media center hooked to my TV or some other things. Like a torrent box maybe. I've went from wouldn't trust USB to trusting it a lot more. That has some value. What will I get into next?? What will the next thread get me into?? There's progress. Dale :-) :-)
