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on last week's episode of Linus cobbles

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something together we made an SSD

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out of a bunch of micro sd cards and this pcb we bought off some chinese site

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um it was super dumb

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overall i'd say it was a waste of both time and money

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but not to be deterred by little things like

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that we are back at it again with another diy

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memory product today we will be making our own usb

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thumb drive will be awesome or will it be awful

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i'll let you know after i tell you about the zotac mech one a compact desktop pc

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built for gaming and featuring a sleek robotic style design you can check it

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out at the link below

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okay so we've cleared away everything that we don't immediately need so let's

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go ahead and crack open an ms09 uh this

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is a brand new one i haven't used it yet come on

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comes with a little screwdriver little screw

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comes with a little enclosure and yeah that's about it so

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there are other m.2 enclosures on the market that

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let you turn a regular drive into an SSD

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but what we like about this one is that it doesn't require

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an external power cable in addition to

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the usb plug on it and it's got kind of a actually it's got

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kind of a nice sort of aluminum sandblasted finish on i mean everything

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silverstone does kind of has a nice aluminum sandblasted finish on it but

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that's not that's not a terrible thing to be known for disassembly fairly

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straightforward oh my goodness

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this piece pushes this piece

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which has little nubbins that stick into the pcb

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it's the whole pcb that slides back and

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forth that is a that is not the least

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janky mechanism i have ever seen in their defense maybe they all worked that

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way i don't know i haven't taken apart a whole lot of usb drives but that doesn't

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seem like the best solution

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all right now let's go ahead and get our m.2 installed we picked a random m.2 that we

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had on the shelf downstairs you can't quite go full random

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this particular drive right here is not compatible with NVMe m.2 SSD so that

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means that you either have to use one with a d key or a b plus m key so as

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long as it's one that is SATA or ahci

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and it should say that somewhere on the SSD

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and it's 42 60 or 80 millimeters long it

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should theoretically both fit and function the other decision we have to

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make with respect to our SSD is which size to go with so we went with a 500

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gig for a couple of reasons so yeah this little guy just kind of goes on here

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wow again this is not this is not the most amazing mounting

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system i've ever seen the screw goes in here then

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reason number one was that we figured by the time you're spending 35 bucks

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on just the the raw pcb and enclosure to make your own usb drive you probably

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want something that's got more capacity than the you know

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commodity one that they were handing out at the last convention you were at and

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number two we wanted to see the best possible

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performance out of our diy drive and

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higher capacity drives do have a tendency to perform a little

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bit better than the lower ones and you can actually get a full explanation for

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why that is in the Techquickie video up here oh wow why is there an extra screw

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anywho with all of that said i'm still not expecting to get anywhere near the

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speeds advertised on the box 10 gigabit per second because of an inherent

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limitation of the product an ahci or a

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SATA m.2 SSD can only go as high as six

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gigabit so at best the benefit we're getting from a gen 2 chipset is another

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gigabit per second but i mean hey any benefit is a benefit and i'll take

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it let's get some performance tests going let's get some performance tests

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going okay so let's meet all of our contestants i'm going to have this guy

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plugged in here just for convenient size comparison as we as we go through let's

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start with a regular old usb drive you can see by comparison it takes up very

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little of the space around it and doesn't stick out nearly so far off the

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back of the system obviously

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now in terms of our test we're going to keep things pretty simple today

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and just copy a 10 gig file to and from

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our drives now this would not be a suitable test if

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this was a boot SSD but because these are just

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external drives and this is absolutely the intended use case

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it's perfectly acceptable in this context all right so at about

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55 megabytes per second right

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and just shy of 140 megabytes per second

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reads even our commodity drive is definitely taking advantage of usb 3

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versus usb2 but it's a low capacity drive and those

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write speeds if you actually had you know a 500 gig drive would be pretty

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painful if it was a drive that you used very frequently to fill up and then

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offload data from because it would take you over two and a half hours to fill a

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500 gig drive at these speeds even if the offload is not nearly so bad almost

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three times as fast let's plug in

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the data traveler ultimate gt

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now if you were gonna actually plug this

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directly into the back of your computer even with the skinniest possible device

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you can see i'm nowhere near being able to put that in there

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i actually can't even access the ones next to it on this side and

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even the type c port i cannot get into

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if there's like any sleeve whatsoever on the cable here

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so yeah that's why they include

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this thing so you can hang it off the back of your drive

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okay that's not bad write speeds are a little slow but read

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speeds are very good at over 350 megs a second

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so if it weren't for the cost and that it's just

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not much more convenient of a form factor compared even to an external

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drive with a dongle this would be a lot more compelling for

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our next trick we've got the t5 portable SSD

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now this has the advantage of easy access to all the ports around it and

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even the ability to use different connectors like if you wanted a type c

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to type c like the one that i have right here but

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the drawback is that you always need

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a cable that was faster than i was expecting

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that is more like i was expecting wait

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no also very very fast well how did

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james get those other results our pre-video preparation failed us

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we still had right caching enabled for this drive so let's go ahead and change

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that which for some reason requires a restart we'll be right back and thanks

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to the magic of video editing we are back immediately

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that is more like what i was expecting

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actually that's still better than i was expecting but this is within the realm

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of possibility so with results like that

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it's no mystery why these things have gotten so popular let's find out if our

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diy SSD usb solution can compare

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oh interesting so it shows up

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as the wd SSD but a usb device

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how cool not bad and read speeds are really good

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these are actually the best results we've seen so far wow

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not too shabby bottom line then you do lose out

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on the ability to install regular usbs or even type c's with the

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extra space afforded by them on either side of it but you can easily put

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something even something fairly bulky right above it if you don't mind them

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kind of going like this a bit and in terms of performance per dollar with our

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hci m.2 it actually looks not bad oh it should

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be noted that your mileage may vary if you put a slower or cheaper drive in

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here maybe you ended up getting one of these because you had an m.2 drive lying

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around from before an upgrade or something like that then your results

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will be different but from our perspective the big winners are

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really well

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honestly everything but this

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because these are cheap and like kind of good enough

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uh this is really compact and offers

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pretty darn good performance but comes at a price premium for its compactness

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this has a dongle but performs really well and is very affordable by

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comparison and then this is flexible a

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little big a little bulky but highly

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configurable and also reasonably affordable tunnelbear tunnelbear is the

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