Question Optimal use for Samsung 980 - - - Gen4x2 slot or enclosure ?

[CrisR82]

Recently after an upgrade to one of my PCs, I ended up with a leftover Samsung 980 (non-Pro) M.2 SSD, so now I'm thinking about what to do with it.

My two options are:

1) Put it in my primary desktop PC as a 3rd drive, however that will be a Gen4x2 slot on my ASRock B650 PG Lightning motherboard

2) Put it in my Ugreen 10Gbps metal enclosure and use as an external drive

I've been reading a bunch of stuff and people seem to claim that an NVMe SSD in an enclosure is a bad idea due to excessive heat (I have had a drive in that one before and it did get very hot at times) and I should instead get a M.2 SATA drive for it.

So my question is, what would be a better use of the drive? I definitely would like to have an external SSD, but I'd rather get a new drive (WD SA510 seems like a reasonable one?) if the 980 would die real fast in an enclosure, I'd hate to ruin hardware for no good reason. If I use it internally - how much of a performance impact should I expect from it being in a Gen4x2 slot?

 

[logainofhades]

I use an external enclosure for an ssd, at work. It does get warm when transferring large amount of data, but the enclosure I use came with a thermal pad, and the housing is aluminum, making it one big heatsink.

I have this one specifically.
https://www.cdw.com/product/plugabl...sure-thunderbolt-3-driverless/7392892?pfm=srh


You won't lose any performance putting it in your motherboard though either. PCI-E is backwards compatible.

 

[Bob.B]

Recently after an upgrade to one of my PCs, I ended up with a leftover Samsung 980 (non-Pro) M.2 SSD, so now I'm thinking about what to do with it.

My two options are:

1) Put it in my primary desktop PC as a 3rd drive, however that will be a Gen4x2 slot on my ASRock B650 PG Lightning motherboard

2) Put it in my Ugreen 10Gbps metal enclosure and use as an external drive

I've been reading a bunch of stuff and people seem to claim that an NVMe SSD in an enclosure is a bad idea due to excessive heat (I have had a drive in that one before and it did get very hot at times) and I should instead get a M.2 SATA drive for it.

So my question is, what would be a better use of the drive? I definitely would like to have an external SSD, but I'd rather get a new drive (WD SA510 seems like a reasonable one?) if the 980 would die real fast in an enclosure, I'd hate to ruin hardware for no good reason. If I use it internally - how much of a performance impact should I expect from it being in a Gen4x2 slot?

Put it in the enclosure and watch the temps.

 

[evermorex76]

Other than during sustained transfers of large amounts of data at continuous maximum speed, being in an enclosure won't be a big issue. In normal usage, with an enclosure that provides any sort of heat dissipation (thermal pad providing contact with the metal enclosure) there just won't be time for the temperature to rise and stay high, and if it happens occasionally it's not a problem. An M.2 SATA drive will have the same issue anyway (and are you sure your enclosure accepts them?). PCIe3 drives also just don't get super hot.

The NVMe controller isn't going to be operating at maximum performance to feed a USB interface so it's not the fact that it's a high-performance chip that's the issue, it's just the limited space for the heat to go. (Even in a mini-PC, there's space on the sides and underside of an SSD where air is flowing and heat can dissipate in addition to the top, which may or may not have a heatsink; there's nowhere for the heat to go in an enclosure except the enclosure surface via the pad. Even having vents in the enclosure doesn't help much as they don't have forced airflow and are often only on one end so there's no "through" flow.) Even during a long ATTO benchmark my PCIe4 drive in an enclosure only gets up to 40C. My internal drives, even with heatsinks, IDLE much higher than that (they don't increase as much during the testing though, and the external drive is exposed to a much colder ambient temp).

As far as not wanting to "ruin hardware for no good reason", at this point it's simply e-waste since it's not being used, so why spend more money NOW buying another drive in order to "preserve" an old drive that is just getting older by the day, and which you may never make use of later? You have the drive in-hand which might just sit in a drawer until it becomes totally obsolete, so use it now for whatever purpose seems good. It's not even like that was an astounding drive to start with (you didn't mention the capacity so I don't know the speed rating), and drives with double the speed can now be had for $60 or less.

A 10Gbps USB enclosure will of course have much lower bandwidth (about 1GBps) than a PCIe3x2 internal connection (2GBps), limited by the drive spec rather than the slot, so even though the drive won't be able to operate at it's maximum PCIe capability, it will be better than the external use when speed is the priority. The USB interface itself introduces other issues like latency, too, and a hit to random performance. If you used a Gen2x2 enclosure with the drive, then you'd have bandwidth more closely matched to the internal slot.

So it really depends on what you think you might want to do with the drive, which somewhat depends on the capacity and what you've got in the system otherwise, and what you might possibly do with it if you used it internally when you've already upgraded your storage. I'd use it as an external backup drive if it has the capacity for all of the data you currently have, otherwise either use it for sticking really unimportant files on that you probably don't need to access often, or use it to upgrade some other machine to extend that system's life. If you use it for backup and your internal storage usage increases later so that the drive is no longer large enough for backups, THEN you'd consider replacing it with a larger one. At that point, SATA is still pointless because there's virtually no cost savings, and there aren't any large M.2 SATA drives anyway, and the heat from performing backups is simply not going to make the drive die any sooner than it would have otherwise. A drive that can max out the 10Gbps USB will also be cheap as chips by then. At worst, it might throttle sometimes, but if it's being used for backup then that isn't really an issue and probably won't happen since backups don't stream the data that fast, and if it's throttling then it's preventing it reaching temperatures that might reduce the lifespan.

What do apps like Crystal DiskInfo show for the health of that drive, anyway? Was it heavily used, bought when it first came out, etc.? After 4 years it's not exactly "young".

 

[CrisR82]

Other than during sustained transfers of large amounts of data at continuous maximum speed, being in an enclosure won't be a big issue. In normal usage, with an enclosure that provides any sort of heat dissipation (thermal pad providing contact with the metal enclosure) there just won't be time for the temperature to rise and stay high, and if it happens occasionally it's not a problem. An M.2 SATA drive will have the same issue anyway (and are you sure your enclosure accepts them?). PCIe3 drives also just don't get super hot.

The NVMe controller isn't going to be operating at maximum performance to feed a USB interface so it's not the fact that it's a high-performance chip that's the issue, it's just the limited space for the heat to go. (Even in a mini-PC, there's space on the sides and underside of an SSD where air is flowing and heat can dissipate in addition to the top, which may or may not have a heatsink; there's nowhere for the heat to go in an enclosure except the enclosure surface via the pad. Even having vents in the enclosure doesn't help much as they don't have forced airflow and are often only on one end so there's no "through" flow.) Even during a long ATTO benchmark my PCIe4 drive in an enclosure only gets up to 40C. My internal drives, even with heatsinks, IDLE much higher than that (they don't increase as much during the testing though, and the external drive is exposed to a much colder ambient temp).

As far as not wanting to "ruin hardware for no good reason", at this point it's simply e-waste since it's not being used, so why spend more money NOW buying another drive in order to "preserve" an old drive that is just getting older by the day, and which you may never make use of later? You have the drive in-hand which might just sit in a drawer until it becomes totally obsolete, so use it now for whatever purpose seems good. It's not even like that was an astounding drive to start with (you didn't mention the capacity so I don't know the speed rating), and drives with double the speed can now be had for $60 or less.

A 10Gbps USB enclosure will of course have much lower bandwidth (about 1GBps) than a PCIe3x2 internal connection (2GBps), limited by the drive spec rather than the slot, so even though the drive won't be able to operate at it's maximum PCIe capability, it will be better than the external use when speed is the priority. The USB interface itself introduces other issues like latency, too, and a hit to random performance. If you used a Gen2x2 enclosure with the drive, then you'd have bandwidth more closely matched to the internal slot.

So it really depends on what you think you might want to do with the drive, which somewhat depends on the capacity and what you've got in the system otherwise, and what you might possibly do with it if you used it internally when you've already upgraded your storage. I'd use it as an external backup drive if it has the capacity for all of the data you currently have, otherwise either use it for sticking really unimportant files on that you probably don't need to access often, or use it to upgrade some other machine to extend that system's life. If you use it for backup and your internal storage usage increases later so that the drive is no longer large enough for backups, THEN you'd consider replacing it with a larger one. At that point, SATA is still pointless because there's virtually no cost savings, and there aren't any large M.2 SATA drives anyway, and the heat from performing backups is simply not going to make the drive die any sooner than it would have otherwise. A drive that can max out the 10Gbps USB will also be cheap as chips by then. At worst, it might throttle sometimes, but if it's being used for backup then that isn't really an issue and probably won't happen since backups don't stream the data that fast, and if it's throttling then it's preventing it reaching temperatures that might reduce the lifespan.

What do apps like Crystal DiskInfo show for the health of that drive, anyway? Was it heavily used, bought when it first came out, etc.? After 4 years it's not exactly "young".

I should've probably posted the enclosure I'm using - https://eu.ugreen.com/collections/hard-drive-enclosures/products/weekly-sale-product-m2-gehause1
It is actually pretty neat, all metal and does include a thermal pad that most definitely proves enough contact between the SSD and the enclosure. I haven't tried a SATA SSD in it, but Ugreen is pretty reputable from what I've seen and it is listed there that both are compatible so I just assumed that part.

The drive itself is in almost perfect condition, it was in a backup mini-PC that gets powered on once a month just to update it, used less than a year (replaced it with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus since I essentially got one for free).

My idea was to use this to replace my Kingston DataTraveler USB sticks (never had any trouble with them, but deer god, they are so slow...) for when I travel and since this is not only bigger in capacity and faster, but also all-metal so wouldn't need to worry about durability either when carrying it around.

In both cases, it won't just sit in a box, for now I think I'll put it in the enclosure since my desktop PC already has several drives in it so I don't really need any additional storage there.

 

[evermorex76]

It seems like using it externally is the obviously better use case, since the concern about heat is overblown. There'd simply be no point in putting an old, slow drive into a PC where the slot would further reduce speed and which has plenty of faster storage.

Flash drives are slower, although there are some quite fast ones these days, but they have the benefit of generally being much smaller and not needing a cable, and for some purposes their speed is plenty fast. The new "USB SSD sticks" take away the cable and they're pretty small, but not quite as small as thumb drives, and of course they'd be a purchase rather than using something you have.