Build Your Own SUPER FAST Thumb Drive!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,762 words · ~8 min read
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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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easy-to-use vpn that keeps you and your
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online activities private from advertisers your internet service
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provider or anyone looking to track you or profit from your data so whether
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you're trying to use services that are not available in your region or you just
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don't want people spying on you tunnelware makes the whole process
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simple you can be protected in just a couple of clicks and if you guys don't
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believe me all you've got to do is go to tunnelbear.com LTT we're going to have
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that linked below and you can sign up for our free trial to see just how easy
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it is that's tunnelbear.com LTT
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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thumbs down button but if you liked it you can hit thumbs up you can get
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subscribed that works pretty well or you can even consider checking out where to buy the
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stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our
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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which
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you should totally join