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Nish Nishant wrote: Did not know this existed. Approximate price?
What Yusef said. 
Marc
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Would it be as fast as an internal SSD? Would the USB interface slow it down?
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Nish Nishant wrote: Would it be as fast as an internal SSD?
Like many question, the answer is 42 it depends. most internal SSDs use eSATA and external SSDs use USB, but not all interfaces are created equal. For starters there is a difference between USB2 and USB3 throughputs. In many cases USB3 (external) will be faster than eSATA ( assuming head-to-head comparison ), but USB3 will be dependent on how may other devices are connected.
In general, for low - mid data access you won't see much difference between internal and external SSDs but for heavy data access internal has slight advantage.
These sources are bit outdated, but the point is still valid http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413310,00.asp[^] and http://www.itworld.com/article/2693284/usb-3-0-vs-esata-is-faster-better.html[^]
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I'm pretty sure that very few internal SSDs use e(xternal)SATA. As for USB3, it still uses 8/10bit encoding; meaning that 5 gigabits/sec translates to 500MB/sec max. Good SATA SSDs will send data faster than that in sequential reads. USB 3.1's speed doubling could push an external drive over the top; but only if it's a PCIe model internally.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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USB3 is theoretically in the same speed class as sata, so it could be as fast as an internal (non-PCIe) SSD; with 3.1 being comparable to 2 PCIe 2.0 lanes. In practice, even devices marketed as USB SSDs generally are 4 flash chip models (laptop or budget desktop equivalent) not 8 chips like higher end desktop SSDs and fall short of high end models. Ones marketed as just high capacity flash drives generally have only 1 flash chip and a crappy controller and are much slower. Cheap USB3 flash drives use bottom binned flash and crappier controllers and make the former look good. USB2 is slow enough that all flash drives will suck similarly.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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What's the advantage to having more flash chips, aside from perhaps higher capacity?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Parallelism. Reading from/writing to 8 chips can be twice as fast as 4, although normally a bit less in practice because especially for reads you rarely get the data equally spread out over all the chips and on sata devices sequential IO is bottlenecked by the bus. 4 vs 2 or 1 is more dramatic because even easy cases can end up not saturating the bus before maxing the flash out.
(If you want to go deeper into the weeds, for a lot of things its the number of flash dies that really count not the number of chips, and 8x8 die chips will perform similarly to 4x16 die ones. This is a big part of why small capacity SSDs are slower than larger ones: as the individual flash dies get denser the bottom end doesn't have enough to keep up with what the controller is capable of. Generally this is only a significant factor with the lowest size drive in a lineup, with the middle and upper ones performing similarly. The SSD makers seem to've learned their lesson when a round of die shrinks meant that 128GB SSDs were feeling the too few die bottleneck, while 64GB ones were performing awfully.)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Thanks, Dan.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Kinda like RAID-0 for flash chips I guess.
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I have a few Dell Precision M6600s with DUAL SSDs, internal.
I have a USB3/eSATA External Device (BlacX) that I use for Cloning drives.
I can tell you that eSATA out performs the USB3 consistently enough that I use it.
Probably 10% faster.
With USB2, I would put destination and source INSIDE the machine, because it was so much faster for both devices to be on the SATA bus.
Finally, if you are running SSDs, please check for firmware updates! We had a Crucial drive failing because we logged more than 5,000hrs on it, and they had some bad code in the firmware.
I even put a spare SSD in my TiVo to see how the continuous writing is handled. 2yrs, still going, but I am ready to take it out and clone it for safety
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: I even put a spare SSD in my TiVo to see how the continuous writing is handled. 2yrs, still going, but I am ready to take it out and clone it for safety
Check the smart levels if you're concerned; but consumer SSDs are still generally good for a write/day for several years even though the warranty max TB written number is much lower (mainly to pressure enterprise customers to buy higher margin products).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Nish Nishant wrote: Would it be as fast as an internal SSD?
The laptop comes with a couple USB 3 ports, which is what it's plugged into. I haven't done any speed tests, but it hums along (well, given that it's silent, it doesn't really hum) quite nicely.
Marc
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At work 1,2 and a phone headset.
At home mouse, trackball, two printers, jump drive, powered USB expansion ports
Mongo: Mongo only pawn... in game of life.
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Kind of minimalist compared to your current setup.
work: keyboard, mouse, iphone, usb license dongle
home PC: keyboard, mouse, sdhc card reader.
home Mac: extenal backup HD, iphone (xor kindle).
I'd rather be phishing!
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At work:
0) Keyboard
1) Left handed mouse (for my use)
2) Right handed mouse (for anyone else)
3) USB Plasma globe
4) Monitor USB hub - to give me a few easily accessible ports for when I need them. At times I've had mobile devices and firmware programmers plugged to these.
At home, drop the 2nd mouse and add multiple USB data/charging cables, a printer, an UPS, and probably at least a few cables that don't have anything plugged into the other end. Snarled cluster-elephant doesn't begin to describe my cabling mess at home and nothing this side of a move will (temporarily) fix it; although in the medium term if all of my networking gear goes to 12V USB power I could buy a single 50-100W charging dock and power my modem, router, switch, and (normal) USB hub all off of a single power cord reducing the snarl and outlet congestion somewhat.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Marc Clifton wrote: (writing ATM software)
Hey Marc ol' buddy ol' pal... you, uh, mind writing me a backdoor into that by chance?
Jeremy Falcon
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Since my PC is an Intel NUC, I've got practically everything running off of USB instead of the usual connectors. It's got exactly one USB port in use, and it's going to a Plugable UD-3000 USB hub, which provides an additional VGA port, Ethernet, audio and a bunch of additional USB3 connectors, one of which is going back to another hub.
The following are all hooked up via USB:
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- SoundBlaster X-Fi (5.1 audio)
- Two monitors
- External SATA/USB hard drive adapter (the toaster kind where you just pop in a drive, not an enclosure)
- DVD burner
- Web cam (which fell somewhere behind my monitor eons ago but is still plugged in)
- MicroSD reader
- One or two extra cables for recharging devices
- Zune (seriously, this thing won't die and I listen to podcasts on it daily)
The printers (one color / one B&W), scanner and UPS are all hooked up to other computers so I don't suppose they count.
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dandy72 wrote: Plugable UD-3000 USB
Ooh, I'm going to have to take a look at that.
Marc
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It's what turned my first-gen Surface Pro into a full-blown workstation, and is now doing the same with my Intel NUC.
(the only reason I've moved away from the Surface Pro is that the NUC can output 4K)
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Marc Clifton wrote:
- credit card reader
- ID scanner
- Verifone pinpa
I'm surprised the spam filter didn't jump to conclusions on this one...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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