First impressions external WD Elements SE SSD 480GB

[BarryK]

The subtitle could be "Please buy a good quality USB stick!"

I bought the SSD today, and have posted some initial impressions, and run tests comparing one of my worst USB sticks (Emtec 8GB) up to my best (SanDisk Extreme 64GB), as well as the WD SSD.

There has been discussion on the forum about using a cheap external SSD instead of a usb-stick, to get more GBs for the Dollar, higher speed and longer lifetime.

Here is my blog post:

https://bkhome.org/news/202205/first-te ... isons.html

I intend to use it every day, and will report back in several months, or sooner if it fails!

[BarryK]

You will notice something odd about those tests using 'dd'
It is showing different number of bytes transferred, for different block sizes.

The "sync" parameters are supposed to flush to the drive while writing and not exit until the file is completely flushed to the drive.

The result on the last dd operation was used to boot the drive, which worked, so the image did get written correctly.

Very interesting... anyone reading this have experience with dd commandline parameters?

Note also, that time to copy 'easy.sfs' at first bootup is followed by a 'sync', so the time that I counted will include the complete flush to the drive.

[BarryK]

Ah, I see what I have done wrong:

Code: Select all

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
602931200 bytes (603 MB, 575 MiB) copied, 2 s, 301 MB/s
773+0 records in
773+0 records out
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 2.73007 s, 297 MB/s

I recorded the first, it should have been the last line. 773 MiB is correct.

OK, will redo them and fix the blog post.

[bigpup]

May want to try this:

DriveSpeed!
viewtopic.php?t=2836

[BarryK]

OK, I have fixed the dd speed tests. Go back to the blog post and do a browser page refresh.

[BarryK]

May want to try this:

DriveSpeed!
viewtopic.php?t=2836

Thanks for that link, I didn't know that Mike had created that speed test app.

[Grey]

I intend to use it every day, and will report back in several months, or sooner if it fails!

Hm... Some time ago I had the idea to compare three devices in terms of speed and, most importantly, their lifespan. A new NVME disk (size 128), a regular SSD disk (128) and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 flash drive (64).

What is convenient for the test is that they are all from Silicon Power. But... I decided to just wait until one of them starts to "crumble" and use such a simple test to identify the most "tenacious" device

[user1111]

Fatdog with a small (40MB) boot first usb partition, fat16; A second fat32 2GB partition, for vmlinuz, initrd, main sfs and save sfs's (multi-session saves), doesn't require permissions capabilities so works fine. Data third partition and again permissions aren't required for the average spreadsheet, word document ...etc, so can also be fat32. And that way the hole usb content is portable, dos/windows/....etc. can read/write it.

Lacks the stability of ext3/ext4, but periodic dd's/backup's is easy (I tend to use mksquashfs).

Data throughput is relatively quick, worth including as a comparison to other format choices IMO.

[williwaw]

Been using a bare laptop ssd with a https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/usb3s2sat3cb

Code: Select all

 # hdparm -I /dev/sdc3

returns...
/snip
* Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)

which I assume indicates FSTRIM will still work with this setup

I have been thinking of an m2 in an enclosure to minimize size for portability, possibly even NVME, but does anyone have any experience with these faster drives being used with USB?
Seems like the USB port would choke data transfer rate and negate the extra speed potential?

[LHESTIA]

Hello,

I have been using easyos for 6 months now on a credit card sized 250 Gb USB SSD. I have no problems, the start-up speed is particularly fast and the software works perfectly.
I opted for this option to be able to be independent of the PC on which I start easy. With 250 Gb, I can carry music, hiking maps, photos, videos and all the files that are useful to me.
However, snapshots cannot be used to mount easy on a smaller capacity USB drive. When mounting my SSD drive, I took the time to take a snapshot before downloading too much data so that I could eventually create a rescue USB drive with my personal office and the added software but the whole having a size adapted to a USB key of a few Gb.
The use of the data on the ‘easyos’ disk requires permanent readings but for the moment, everything is going well. To follow over time.
Sincerely.

[BarryK]

Been using a bare laptop ssd with a https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/usb3s2sat3cb

Code: Select all

 # hdparm -I /dev/sdc3

returns...
/snip
* Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)

which I assume indicates FSTRIM will still work with this setup

I have been thinking of an m2 in an enclosure to minimize size for portability, possibly even NVME, but does anyone have any experience with these faster drives being used with USB?
Seems like the USB port would choke data transfer rate and negate the extra speed potential?

The init script in the initrd checks for trim capability and will do an fstrim operation every 20th bootup.

I have two external SSDs that I use for backup, one 2.5" sata, one m2 nvme:

https://bkhome.org/news/202201/observed ... -ssds.html

The Samsung EVO m2 nvme SSD runs so hot!

I commented on that blog post that the nvme didn't seem any faster, I surmised due to the usb bottleneck. But, I'm using usb3.0 socket on the PC, a type-c might do much better.

mikewalsh commented recently, confirming they run hot.

However, having second thoughts about SSDs as backup. Not long-term anyway.
I was reading yesterday that left unpowered, the storage in an SSD deteriorates -- quite fast, you may lose your data in about a year.

[wiak]

I have two external SSDs that I use for backup, one 2.5" sata, one m2 nvme:

https://bkhome.org/news/202201/observed ... -ssds.html

The Samsung EVO m2 nvme SSD runs so hot!

I commented on that blog post that the nvme didn't seem any faster, I surmised due to the usb bottleneck. But, I'm using usb3.0 socket on the PC, a type-c might do much better.

I'm pretty sure there won't be noticeable difference between using sata or nvme ssd connected via a usb 3.0 port. nvme is really just NAND flash like other ssd devices but gets its speed from use of PCIe bus lanes (i.e. the interface/bus), which is why end result is much faster than sata interface/protocol ssd. Clearly if you interface via usb the latency (time to start reading/writing) and the throughput will be determined by the usb interface.

Type-c is just a connector, not the interface spec, which depends on the circuitry connected to the usb-c connector, so on many computers that might just be usb 3.2. What would make a huge difference, I believe, is if the external SSD was connected to a usb type-c port that implemented Thunderbolt 3 since that does effectively use PCIe bus lanes as far as I understand it. My newish HP Probook 430 G8 comes with a usb type-c port (as do lots of laptops over the past years) but, alas just usb 3.1 and not Thunderbolt - seems to be one factor that makes the machine not so expensive (laptops that include Thunderbolt all seem quite expensive at the moment, at least here in NZ). My laptop does include nvme SSD but an internal one, so that is certainly fast since using PCIe bus - but yes it is a concern that five or ten years from now the NAND flash storage involved may be dead or lose data if I go to sleep for a year ...

Very interesting how differently different usb sticks perform though - poor ones introducing their own bottlenecks and limitations in interface designs.