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. -- Rich
