On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 10:32 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Even tho the USB on my phone is slow, my puter USB isn't the fastest out > there either, it is pretty darn fast.
Sure, but it would be just as fast with a $30 USB thumb drive as with an M.2 drive plus enclosure and all that. > Also, very large storage space > compared to USB sticks. The biggest USB stick I've ever bought, 128GB. > I haven't used it yet. It just sits on my desk. You can get 1TB USB drives. They're probably comparable in performance to what you're putting together. > I > could build a Raspberry Pi for a NAS box, a media center hooked to my TV > or some other things. Like a torrent box maybe. USB3 drives work fine on a Pi. Just make sure it is a newer Pi that actually has USB3 and not an old one which is v2 only. Also, I think those Pis only have one USB host, so for hard drives that probably isn't much of an issue but if you're going to use it for more than one SSD drive it will start to limit the bandwidth across all of them. > I've went from > wouldn't trust USB to trusting it a lot more. That has some value. Sure, but you don't need to buy an M.2 drive for that. All that said, looking at prices, you aren't paying THAT much of a premium for the M.2 enclosure. So maybe it isn't a terrible idea if you don't mind the larger form factor, and can avoid breaking it (I'm guessing the M.2 enclosure is more fragile than a typical thumb drive). I'm actually buying NVMe more for my storage simply because NVMe flash isn't much more expensive than SATA flash anyway, so might as well get the IOPS. I'm still running it over PCIe though. -- Rich
