Question Do external SSD drives need battery?

[tomboing]

Do external SSD drives need battery? I saw in one external SSD specs that a battery id required.

 

[ThatVietGuy]

No, an external SSD (whether it be placing an SSD in an external enclosure or something produced by a company like WD) should be able to be powered completely by USB. It would be no different compared to a portable 2.5" HDD.

Provide a link to the product that you're describing.

 

[tomboing]

No, an external SSD (whether it be placing an SSD in an external enclosure or something produced by a company like WD) should be able to be powered completely by USB. It would be no different compared to a portable 2.5" HDD.

Provide a link to the product that you're describing.

Please see the link

Amazon.ae

The technical details mentions " one lithium ion battery required'

Also when I tried to google, I could not find much except in one comment someone mentioned that NAND flash memory requires power to hold memory for more than 3-5 years (see the link below). I have used many flash pen drives even beyond 5 years without data loss.

Does SSD Need the Power to Retain Data? The Answers Are Here!

Do you plan to keep all the backups on an SSD drive? Do you know how long an SSD can hold the data? If not, read the guide to find if SSDs need the power to retain data. While SSDs are fast, they are built differently from HDDs and come with drawbacks, which you should know to avoid any data...

www.easeus.com

 

[USAFRet]

The technical details mentions " one lithium ion battery required'

The Amazon listing may be in error, or there may be a little lithium battery inside.

The data sheet at SanDisk says nothing about the battery.

https://www.westerndigital.com/tools/documentRequestHandler?docPath=/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/sandisk/product/portable-drives/extreme-usb-3-2-ssd/data-sheet-sandisk-extreme-usb-3-2-ssd.pdf

This is not something you need to worry about.

 

[tomboing]

Great Thanks for the reassurance

 

[fzabkar]

Man, this is so funny.

Five batteries (or is it 10?) weighing a total of 10 grams (or 20 grams?) with a capacity of 2 kWH (or is it 2kWH per cell?). Or does the battery consist of 5 cells (or 10 cells)?

LOL !!!!

Lithium Battery Energy Content	‎2 Kilowatt Hours
Lithium Battery Packaging	‎Batteries packed with equipment
Lithium Battery Weight	‎2 Grams
Number Of Lithium Ion Cells	‎5
Number of Lithium Metal Cells	‎5

This is a genuine 2kWH lithium battery:

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H43ebbe9...12V-200Ah-recargable-electric.jpg_640x640.jpg

These are lithium coin cells:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Coin-cells.jpg

 

[Misgar]

I agree with fzabkar. All that stuff about batteries is complete nonsense. I've seen numerous other items on Amazon with similar batteries mentioned in the technical description.

Maybe a junior employee at Amazon is using an existing listing as a template for a new product abd their supervisor is failing to spot the error. Regardless, it means I don't trust everything written down in Amazon listings.

If I could find a 2 Kilowatt Hour battery weighing only 2 grams (or 10g) instead of something like 40 kilograms, I could make a fortune refurbishing electric cars.

I own a number of similar portable SSDs and doubt very much that they contain any batteries. Of course I can't be certain because I haven't disassembled them, but reviews of these devices sometimes show what's inside and it's often an M.2 NVMe drive with SATA to USB interface.

Enterprise SATA SSDs used to have multiple elecrolytic (or solid?) capacitors on board to provide enough power for write operations from cache to complete in the event of sudden power loss, but this "capacitor" power supply only lasted a few seconds.