I've pretty much stopped using 'stick' type storage for anything >256MB, as regardless of brand and series, my experience is that these thingies overheat under anything but light write usage, and either slow to a crawl or drop off the USB bus entirely before my copy is finished.
'Credit card' sized SSDs are not that much more inconvenient to carry and store, and don't exhibit any of these issues for me.
And the thermals on these things must be horrible, plus the label makes it look like a knock-off: Sandirk?
NVMe enclosure are cheap, mine is a ugreen supporting usb 3.2 gen2 and i paid less than 20 euro. Put any kind of half decent nvme in it covered by one of those cheap heat dissipator.
And not for nothing, the SSDs that GP is describing are exactly this - NVME sticks with a USB/Thunderbolt interface and some kind of usually aluminum enclosure with a layer of thermal conductive material.
Dockcase makes enclosures with a capacitor that hold ~5 or 10 seconds of charge, and on power loss sends whatever the “get ready for shut down NOW” signal is to the contained drives. This obviously doesn’t help with unsynced data that the OS had not sent to the drive yet. I use one for a ventoy install, an another for a windows to go install. Windows on a usb stick is finicky to get recognized as bootable sometimes (likely a combination of hardware and software), but otherwise works well when it’s up.
One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with
These look cool but support only up to 4TB capacity? That feels like a super silly limitation. Do they plan to release anything with higher capacity support? Or maybe these would unofficially work fine with 8TB etc.?
I can’t say for sure, but I regard all statements on maximum supported capacity to mean “that’s the biggest drive we had to test so far”, rather than being an actual technical limitation
One thing I forgot warn about, while this applies to every drive with data you care about, have automated and tested backups. SSDs can and will just up and die, and most drives these days are going to be completely unrecoverable in practice unless the issue is solder ball corrosion/breakage.
Basically, be prepared for that 8TB of data to go poof, where it’s in an enclosure or not.
If your drive is suddenly missing, you might need to reboot, or remove the device to drain power and try again, or use a different USB port. Rarely, drives need to get power cycled to recover from power loss (I’ve not had to do with with my dockcase enclosure, but did a few times prior in earlier enclosures). See https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
Also stay away from cheap Samsung OEM drives on eBay, they have dogshit firmware that’s often been fucked with by whatever the vendor was, with no good way to get updates even if they exist. If your drive suddenly shows up as 1GB with the firmware version of “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”), it’s all gone.
You might be surprised. Just the other day I put an 8 TB drive in an old USB 2.0 SATA enclosure and it presented as a 1.1 TB drive, suggesting that the bridge chip is limited to 31-bit (?!?) LBAs.
It's key to get an enclosure with a chipset that will support whatever interface your computer actually provides, otherwise a lot of these enclosures will fall back to USB-3 speeds for compatibility and things will be slow. This site gives a pretty good overview of the chipsets out there and pros/cons of each one.
I've had good experiences with Acasis[1] enclosures - they seem have a lot of aluminum surface area for dissipating heat - but I get the feeling that a lot of these things are very similar in practice since they're just slapping the same chipsets into different boxes.
+1 for that Acasis. I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional >1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. I benchmarked it with DiskMark64 and speeds are as expected for 40Gbps-class xfer.
It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly.
It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.
At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.
I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.
The most irritating thing about the credit-card sized ones, are how they aren’t attached if you move around.
I like to be mobile, so I put some velcro ultra-mate on the back of my laptop, and also on my disk, then the disk can be attached and plugged in while I move around.
I also got a 90-degree USB-C cable for a more direct cable route.
I just upgraded the internal storage of my Lenovo T14 (AMD, Gen6) to 4TB, and that took all of 5 minutes. And that laptop was definitely made in 2025, although I agree that consumer sentiment overwhelmingly favors models that are less convenient in that respect.
Not really an issue outside the Apple ecosystem and a few fringe tablet hybrids like from Microsoft. Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
> Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
Though some make it quite difficult to get in to replace the drive, and put everything back together after.
Some are very easy: an obvious compartment at the bottom, unscrew lid, remove drive, put in replacement, power up and transfer old content, done. I've seen both NVMe and 2.5" SATA drives arranged this way. On the other hand, upgrading my friend's laptop recently involved taking most of it apart, the drive was under the keyboard inaccessible from the back, with other link cables (for keyboard, antenna, screen) in the way so they had to be disconnected and were in very inconvenient arrangements for reconnecting after…
This reminded me of my professor's laptop with a Ricochet wireless modem attached in much the same way back in the early/mid 1990s. That was an early wireless ISP prevalent in the SF Bay Area.
These days most of them seem to work just fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I use several brands across all 3 and never had an issue. I like the DOCKCASE Visual Smart ($40) or Explorer Edition ($50). They have large capacitors to provide 10 seconds of power loss protection, support 10Gbps USB speeds, and have a second USB port just for power which makes it compatible with SSD's that draw a lot of power. I like the info on the little screens because I swap SSD's in/out frequently. There are cheaper ones that work fine too - the "SABRENT USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure" ($30) is nice for, well, not needing a screwdriver to swap out the drive - but it might not deliver enough power for some overkill SSD like the (now Sandisk) WD Black SN8100 - but the DockCase will, as long as you also plug in an auxiliary power USB cable.
A drive like the Patriot Memory P400 Lite is very low power, so it works with cheaper enclosures or USB ports that don't deliver as much power to the peripheral. It also generates less heat, which can help sustain performance depending on the enclosure and environment.
I have experience with ext4 not through deliberate choice but through circumstance.
ext4 can't be natively mounted in Mac and Windows but you can install third party software and still mount it from the command line easily. And of course ext4 works fine with Linux natively.
I don't know if you can install the Mac OS or Windows OS on an ext4 drive and directly boot from it, however.
ExFAT is becoming a good option on all three. Windows and MacOS have native support, and more and more Linux distros are getting support as well I believe.
When you say Linux, reliability depends on distro. I had tried to install Mint on an external harddrive, and the stupid installer modified the boot loader to search for Grub on the removable disk. No removable disk, no grub, no booting of any OS. Idiotic. Lets not get started on the repair/recovery process since another mainstream OS recovery tools wont mount Fat32 EFI partition in R/W, needed to verify the uuid for bootmanager.exe - long story short, had to reinstall everything. Note - neither Windows or Linux are on that box anymore, but Haiku and OSX works brilliantly.
I am begining to dislike mint, that I incidentaly downoaded via mobile data onto an old hinky android phone, then put on a usb drive with a usb/c adapter, with "etchDroid", and booted an ancient desk top with.
The phone I have now, has a sim tray with places for 2 SIM's and an SD card, so with one of these 1TB, USB-C drives and a 1 TB SD card, it should be possible to carry a local copy of OSM, and a copy of wikipedia(text only) with plenty of room left, the full wiki is a monsterous 410 TB
Every Wikipedia article including pictures is ~111GB. Unless you want all of the edit history then maybe you are right.
I have had Wikipedia on my phone for years, local search is fast enough. I also recommend Wiktionary, which has practically every word in every language and is less than 10GB.
ok!thanks
I took the numbers I found at face value.
Having local copys of OSM and wiki will be a
big asset for work, as mobile data is my only source, and it is not exactly reliable.
though I do have enough data on my business plan to indulge in an occasional download frenzy from the awsome site you linked.
I have to admit I still don't really know what thunderbolt even is. I think it's something that is done over USB-C, and requires hardware support on the CPU.
I'm guessing it's one search query + a one minute read away though. I just haven't.
Does Oculink have any special sauce to it? I was under the impression it presented itself as regular old PCI-e and it is really "just" a cabling solution.
I've always wondered about why those little gadgets don't come with metal encasings bonded to the chip with a thermal pad, or putty out of the factory. Be it brushed aluminum, copper, or another alloy. Brushed, anodized, or with fins for 'heavy duty (outdoor/industrial?)' use(which you could clean with a brush, if need be).
There should be a market/demand for that, when people are paying fantasy prices for gamified crap, yes?
They do? But that just means that my Transcend USB stick, made from aluminium, just heats up to 60C which makes it very hard to remove after writing without burning your fingers :(
Interesting that you mention that brand :-) I had some of them long ago, and they didn't last long. The true metal enclosure was just that, with the 'board' just held in place by the USB-part, and some pins from the other end. No thermal pads, or putty.
The other one was just metallic painted plastic.
That was the era of 512MB to 4GB. Never bought again from them.
I have two SSK USB sticks that give me write speeds of up to 1GB/s (as long as they're not filled to the brim). I've copied things like 80GB games in something like 2-3 minutes. A real SSD will always be best, but I'm pretty happy with these USB sticks.
The USB sticks you talk about are basically USB SSDs, not what we know as traditional thumb drives.
I have a similar one too from HP(PNY), and it's crazy fast for its size, but the issue is its controller (ASMedia IIRC) reports it to the OS as a UAS (USB Attached SCSI), similar to an external HDD, instead of Removable Mass Storage as most thumb drives do, so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it, and that controller seems to be backlisted by the Linux kernel for some reason, so it's not recognized on linux unless I fiddle with the "options usb-storage quirks" kernel parameters, but even so my BIOS can't detect it to boot from it. From what I understand the issue causing all this is that it's a native 4K-block device causing issues with booting on it as typically 512-byte block native devices are required for EFI boot, or at least that have 512-byte emulation support which this controller does not.
I am so disappointed because I bought a fast USB SSD to install and dual boot Linux on it as a second drive for my Windows laptop. If only I knew that there's such a big difference in the types of USB drives out there and that they're not all remotely the same.
So do your due diligence on linux compatibility, if you ever want to buy these USB SSDs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it". If I use it in Windows or Linux, I can eject it like I can any standard non-SSD USB stick. I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically? I've seen some messed up BIOS's that simply defy all expectation in how they work. Then again, I primarily only use these things to transfer data between machines (primarily games), so all I really care about is their performance.
I also preferably call them USB sticks instead of SSDs, since afaik TRIM isn't supported on them, which makes them significantly worse than any proper SSD.
>I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it"
Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
> I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically?
NO, like I explained before, it's not the BIOS, it's the lack of 512 block support on the USB SSD controller which is very uncommon on traditional USB thumb drives but is needed for UEFI/BIOS boot. USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
>I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue.
Because yours have 512 native support like most USB drives. But No 512 support, no OS boot. Simple.
MSC and UAS are SCSI transport protocols and have nothing to do with a device being identified as a removable device, which happens at the higher command set layer.
Specifically, flash drives typically set the removable media bit in their response to the SCSI INQUIRY command, which makes the OS believe they contain a medium that can be removed and replaced, like a floppy, "superfloppy" (Zip, LS-120, SyQuest, etc.), or optical drive.
This is why Windows, in particular, exhibits curious behavior when dealing with flash drives:
It assigns a drive letter to a flash drive even if it contains no partitions — MS-DOS and Windows floppies, "superfloppies", and optical media were traditionally unpartitioned.
It allows you to eject the "medium" from the drive — at which point it typically becomes unusable, like a floppy drive with no disk inserted, unless you have a way to send a START STOP UNIT command with the load eject bit set (e.g., the sg3_utils[1] sg_start command), which directs a removable drive to attempt to load the inserted medium (a tray-loading CD-ROM drive with an open tray will retract the tray and spin up the disc, if present; a tape drive capable of injecting an ejected tape will do so; a flash drive with nothing to physically eject will once again present as a drive with medium present).
Most usefully, it causes Windows to default to more conservative caching behavior that makes surprise removal safer (this can be changed for specific devices via Properties in Device Manager), and therefore doesn't display a warning when the drive is physically disconnected without requesting disconnection from the OS and waiting for the "safe to remove" notification.
> Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
"need" according to what? If this is about writeback caching, you can turn that off manually for the disk. And isn't windows the only OS that disables it by default for removable disks?
> USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
> The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
>Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
Which EFIs and bootloaders support that though? Everything I tried failed.
Thanks I already switched to a SATA SSD with USB3.0 adapter that works for booting Linux, I'm just annoyed spending the money on a fast pricy USB drive that doesn't work for anything else than Windows file transfers because of some BS technicality.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro is the best I've found for USB sticks (not to be confused with the "Extreme Go" which looks very similar and sucks). Just be aware that there are a lot of knockoffs, so be careful of where you source and test the speed of a large file copy (along with checksumming the contents) right after purchasing. The real drives always have a metal enclosure as well, which helps.
'Credit card' sized SSDs are not that much more inconvenient to carry and store, and don't exhibit any of these issues for me.
And the thermals on these things must be horrible, plus the label makes it look like a knock-off: Sandirk?