on last week's episode of Linus cobbles
something together we made an SSD
out of a bunch of micro sd cards and this pcb we bought off some chinese site
um it was super dumb
overall i'd say it was a waste of both time and money
but not to be deterred by little things like
that we are back at it again with another diy
memory product today we will be making our own usb
thumb drive will be awesome or will it be awful
i'll let you know after i tell you about the zotac mech one a compact desktop pc
built for gaming and featuring a sleek robotic style design you can check it
out at the link below
okay so we've cleared away everything that we don't immediately need so let's
go ahead and crack open an ms09 uh this
is a brand new one i haven't used it yet come on
comes with a little screwdriver little screw
comes with a little enclosure and yeah that's about it so
there are other m.2 enclosures on the market that
let you turn a regular drive into an SSD
but what we like about this one is that it doesn't require
an external power cable in addition to
the usb plug on it and it's got kind of a actually it's got
kind of a nice sort of aluminum sandblasted finish on i mean everything
silverstone does kind of has a nice aluminum sandblasted finish on it but
that's not that's not a terrible thing to be known for disassembly fairly
straightforward oh my goodness
this piece pushes this piece
which has little nubbins that stick into the pcb
it's the whole pcb that slides back and
forth that is a that is not the least
janky mechanism i have ever seen in their defense maybe they all worked that
way i don't know i haven't taken apart a whole lot of usb drives but that doesn't
seem like the best solution
all right now let's go ahead and get our m.2 installed we picked a random m.2 that we
had on the shelf downstairs you can't quite go full random
this particular drive right here is not compatible with NVMe m.2 SSD so that
means that you either have to use one with a d key or a b plus m key so as
long as it's one that is SATA or ahci
and it should say that somewhere on the SSD
and it's 42 60 or 80 millimeters long it
should theoretically both fit and function the other decision we have to
make with respect to our SSD is which size to go with so we went with a 500
gig for a couple of reasons so yeah this little guy just kind of goes on here
wow again this is not this is not the most amazing mounting
system i've ever seen the screw goes in here then
reason number one was that we figured by the time you're spending 35 bucks
on just the the raw pcb and enclosure to make your own usb drive you probably
want something that's got more capacity than the you know
commodity one that they were handing out at the last convention you were at and
number two we wanted to see the best possible
performance out of our diy drive and
higher capacity drives do have a tendency to perform a little
bit better than the lower ones and you can actually get a full explanation for
why that is in the Techquickie video up here oh wow why is there an extra screw
anywho with all of that said i'm still not expecting to get anywhere near the
speeds advertised on the box 10 gigabit per second because of an inherent
limitation of the product an ahci or a
SATA m.2 SSD can only go as high as six
gigabit so at best the benefit we're getting from a gen 2 chipset is another
gigabit per second but i mean hey any benefit is a benefit and i'll take
it let's get some performance tests going let's get some performance tests
going okay so let's meet all of our contestants i'm going to have this guy
plugged in here just for convenient size comparison as we as we go through let's
start with a regular old usb drive you can see by comparison it takes up very
little of the space around it and doesn't stick out nearly so far off the
back of the system obviously
now in terms of our test we're going to keep things pretty simple today
and just copy a 10 gig file to and from
our drives now this would not be a suitable test if
this was a boot SSD but because these are just
external drives and this is absolutely the intended use case
it's perfectly acceptable in this context all right so at about
55 megabytes per second right
and just shy of 140 megabytes per second
reads even our commodity drive is definitely taking advantage of usb 3
versus usb2 but it's a low capacity drive and those
write speeds if you actually had you know a 500 gig drive would be pretty
painful if it was a drive that you used very frequently to fill up and then
offload data from because it would take you over two and a half hours to fill a
500 gig drive at these speeds even if the offload is not nearly so bad almost
three times as fast let's plug in
the data traveler ultimate gt
now if you were gonna actually plug this
directly into the back of your computer even with the skinniest possible device
you can see i'm nowhere near being able to put that in there
i actually can't even access the ones next to it on this side and
even the type c port i cannot get into
if there's like any sleeve whatsoever on the cable here
so yeah that's why they include
this thing so you can hang it off the back of your drive
okay that's not bad write speeds are a little slow but read
speeds are very good at over 350 megs a second
so if it weren't for the cost and that it's just
not much more convenient of a form factor compared even to an external
drive with a dongle this would be a lot more compelling for
our next trick we've got the t5 portable SSD
now this has the advantage of easy access to all the ports around it and
even the ability to use different connectors like if you wanted a type c
to type c like the one that i have right here but
the drawback is that you always need
a cable that was faster than i was expecting
that is more like i was expecting wait
no also very very fast well how did
james get those other results our pre-video preparation failed us
we still had right caching enabled for this drive so let's go ahead and change
that which for some reason requires a restart we'll be right back and thanks
to the magic of video editing we are back immediately
that is more like what i was expecting
actually that's still better than i was expecting but this is within the realm
of possibility so with results like that
it's no mystery why these things have gotten so popular let's find out if our
diy SSD usb solution can compare
oh interesting so it shows up
as the wd SSD but a usb device
how cool not bad and read speeds are really good
these are actually the best results we've seen so far wow
not too shabby bottom line then you do lose out
on the ability to install regular usbs or even type c's with the
extra space afforded by them on either side of it but you can easily put
something even something fairly bulky right above it if you don't mind them
kind of going like this a bit and in terms of performance per dollar with our
hci m.2 it actually looks not bad oh it should
be noted that your mileage may vary if you put a slower or cheaper drive in
here maybe you ended up getting one of these because you had an m.2 drive lying
around from before an upgrade or something like that then your results
will be different but from our perspective the big winners are
really well
honestly everything but this
because these are cheap and like kind of good enough
uh this is really compact and offers
pretty darn good performance but comes at a price premium for its compactness
this has a dongle but performs really well and is very affordable by
comparison and then this is flexible a
little big a little bulky but highly
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