Michael wrote: > On Wednesday, 26 February 2025 14:43:41 Greenwich Mean Time Dale wrote: >> Rich Freeman wrote: >>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 12:26 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> I'm pretty sure you mentioned this once before in one of my older >>>> threads. I can't find it tho. I use PCIe x1 cards to connect my SATA >>>> drives for my video collection and such. You mentioned once what the >>>> bandwidth was for that setup and how many drives it would take to pretty >>>> much max it out. Right now, I have one card for two sets of LVs. One >>>> LV has four drives and the other has three. What would be the limiting >>>> factor on that, the drives, the PCIe bus or something else? >>> It depends on the PCIe revision, and of course whether the controller >>> actually maxes it out. >>> >>> 1x PCIe v3 can do 0.985GB/s total. That's about 5 HDDs if they're >>> running sequentially, and again assumes that your controller can >>> actually handle all that data. For each generation of PCIe >>> forward/backwards either double/halve the transfer rate. The >>> interface works at the version of PCIe supported by both the >>> motherboard+CPU and the adapter card. >>> >>> If you're talking about HDDs in practice the HDDs are probably still >>> the bottleneck. If these were SATA SSDs then odds are that the PCIe >>> lane is limiting things, because I doubt this is an all-v5 setup. >>> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#History_and_revisions >>> >>> The big advantage of NVMe isn't so much the bandwidth as the IOPS, >>> though both benefit. Those run at full PCIe 4x interface speed per >>> drive, but of course you need 4 lanes per drive for this, which is >>> hard to obtain on consumer motherboards at any scale. >> This I think is what I needed. As it is, I'm most likely not maxing >> anything out, yet. The drives for Data, torrent stuff, stays pretty >> busy. Mostly reading. My other set of drives, videos, isn't to busy >> most of the time. A few MBs/sec or something, playing videos type >> reading. Still, next time I power down, I may stick that second card in >> and divide things up a bit. Might benefit if those cards aren't to great. >> >> I did copy this info and stuck in in a text file so I don't have to dig >> for it again, or ask again. ;-) >> >> Thanks. >> >> Dale >> >> :-) :-) > The other thing to straighten out, already hinted at by Rich et al., is an > NVMe M.2 card in a USB 3 enclosure won't be able to maximise its SSD transfer > rates. To do this it will require a Thunderbolt connector and a > corresponding > Thenderbolt PC port, which will connect it internally to the computer's PCIe > bus, rather than USB/SATA. Hence a previous comment questioning the > perceived > value of paying for a NVMe SSD M.2 form factor within a USB enclosure. It > won't really derive much if any performance benefit compared to a *good* > quality USB 3 flash drive (UFD), which can be sourced at a much lower price > point. > > External storage medium, transfer protocol, device controller, PC bus and > cables/connectors/ports, will all have to have aligned generations of > technology and standards, if you expect to make most of their advertised > transfer speeds. Otherwise you'll be stuck at some component of a lower > performance providing a bottleneck to your aspirations. ;-) > > Sometime ago I bought a SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD, which has a USB-C > connector and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 controller as a replacement for a flaky USB 3.0 > stick. It is slightly bigger than a small UFD and more expensive than the > cheaper UFD offerings, but the faster speeds more than compensate for it. At > the time I bought it, external NVMe M.2 drives were too expensive and I only > had USB 3.0 ports anyway. So in my use case it was offering the best bang > for > my buck.
It is true that this is a costly method. A USB stick is also much smaller as well. Thing is, it was easier for me to connect to my phone. The included cable did the job just fine. It also allowed me to put my eggs in more than one basket. I'll still likely store important files on USB sticks, since I'm not using them for anything else, but I also have it on a m.2 stick as well. I'm not really worried about speed. As it is, it is plenty fast enough. Even when I copied my camera pics to the m.2 stick, it only took a few minutes. It copied them over while I was doing something else. Having it finish in half the time or something wouldn't have affected me at all. If it took a couple more minutes, that would have been fine too. Also, I got to play with external storage on my new rig. I didn't trust it on my old rig. I had lots of issues with USB and storage on the old rig. The new rig, be it software, hardware or both does a lot better. It also has the faster USB 3 stuff, including a type C port. Either way, I trust it more now. I also had a little fun playing with this stuff. Keep in mind, the first m.2 stick I saw was the one I bought for my OS on this new rig. Before that, only read about them or saw pictures of them. Plus read about them on this list. Basically, I'm happy. Did find out that backing up /root, /etc, world file and my camera directory almost fills up this 480GB stick. Oh, I also noticed they fixed the title on the listing. It now says 480GB instead of 1TB. Disappointed that I didn't get a response tho. They could have said sorry for the boo boo. :/ Still, I'm fine with it. Dale :-) :-)
