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Portable Storage devices and some limits

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beanflying:



No idea where this is going but it started with me buying a dirt cheap External USB NVMe HD and a 1Tb WD 770 Black to go in it. This generated some discussion in the 'what did you buy today thread' about in particular heat issues and external HDD's and now Solid State HD's.

So just some basic experimental data using 'Crystal Disk Mark' to generate some consistent loads and CPUID's Hardware monitor to keep an eye on the internal Temperatures of the drives under load.

Same basic tests (so far) 5x 1Gb test data using long read writes down to shorter more choppy reads and writes typically not what you would be using an external drive for.

The old 3 1/2" Seagate is a relic and I have since donated it to a mate of mine, no temp data was available from it but I have never felt it get even warm during multi hundred Gb backups in the past.

The 2 1/2" WD is part of my NAS disaster recovery pack if it is ever needed. Typically it gets plugged in and I go to bed while the NAS does it's thing. Slow speed isn't an issue and unless you were running it in an Aussie Summer on short read writes then Temps are unlikely to ever be an issue. To this end I can't see any point doing further testing but feel free to test your own spinny ones and add the data.

Now where it gets really interesting  >:D

Below is just a first round of testing based on a stock trash enclosure where the NVMe has no contact with it other than air. I do have some 1mm thermal pads so that is round two to see if there is a simple temperature drop for the sake of a few cents extra. I also have a few NVMe heatsinks and a better enclosure coming for some additional testing next week.

Fairly logical as the data transfer rate increases so does the Temperature.

EDIT Added USB 3.2 Gen 1 port test from another PC.

NVMe drives and in particular as USB 4 when it gets released with some of the PCIe4 grade drives used. What and how in the hell will you be keeping them cool or will they even need to be?

beanflying:
Ran into some stability issues and the USB 3.2 Gen 1 port was dropping my generic swill USB 3.1 Drive to USB 2 speeds and dropping out randomly  :palm:

Trawling the backblocks of the internerd and reading and trawling I found a zip file with what seemed to be an updated Realtek driver set and installer and the change log indicated the slow down was addressed several versions prior. So I will link it here but **** use it at your own risk.  Station Drivers Realtek update

Remove the NVMe FIRST !!! Take the opportunity to drop it into a PC and upgrade it's firmware too.
Plug in the board and run JEYI.exe
Push the Update button.

Reinstall the NVME into it and everything worked for me at least. The old firmware on mine was 1.29.x

I have since run some heavier tests of it and so far no drop outs and operating at a throttled USB 3.1 speeds on the 3.2 ports  :-+

DiTBho:
For me XHCI is very problematic  :-//

rdl:
Considering they're short term and only under heavy load, none of those temperatures seem all that bad to me.

beanflying:
Sure 54C isn't terrible but we can do better  :-/O

This will vary depending on your NMVe drive and actual enclosure but there is just on 1mm of gap between the main memory handling and memory packages to the case. So a couple of tiny bits on them an a thin wipe of heatsink compound to help them slide on the enclosure but stay put on the IC's.

Really well worth it I think 10C drop from the noticed peak on a first run and on a second shortly after (started at 34C) still 9C under the non pad version. Hey China spend 0.02C and make it better by including some material in the kit.

More on this when I get the next enclosure and heatsinks to play with but even now I am happy I could hammer this one on a hot Summers day without any issues.

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