Linux Tests Of The QNINE M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure To USB-C Adapter

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Tests Of The QNINE M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure To USB-C Adapter

In the past few months a number of M.2 NVMe SSD to USB adapters have been appearing on the market. Curious about the performance potential on Linux of an NVMe SSD drive attached to a USB 3.1 connection, I recently picked up a QNINE NVMe solid-state drive enclosure for benchmarking.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27701

[darkbasic]

Is there any adapter which supports both NVME and SATA M.2 drives?

[andrei_me]

Nice benchmark, you received your money back, and could assess the interest for this kind of benchmark

[torsionbar28]

USB 3.1 is quite frankly the first iteration of USB that doesn't suck ass at storage. It only took what, 23 years to get here. yay?

v1.x was serial port replacement. v2.0 was stupid slow, no reason to use it over firewire. v3.0 gained some speed, but still limited performance and functionality due to garbage storage protocols (MSC/UMS/MTP), and the 3.0 micro connector used by storage devices was fragile trash. Finally with USB 3.1, we have full SCSI command set (UASP) and we have a decent connector (type C). Honestly, if USB didn't have the major backing of intel, it never would have took off.

[schmidtbag]

Is there any adapter which supports both NVME and SATA M.2 drives?

Huh? The product tested in this article does; the SSD tested in the article is an NVMe drive. To my knowledge, all NVMe drives also support SATA. If you want something that'll benefit from the extra performance of an NVMe drive's PCIe lanes, I think the overhead and abstraction of USB would diminish those returns.

[ypnos]

Huh? The product tested in this article does; the SSD tested in the article is an NVMe drive. To my knowledge, all NVMe drives also support SATA. If you want something that'll benefit from the extra performance of an NVMe drive's PCIe lanes, I think the overhead and abstraction of USB would diminish those returns.

You are misinformed. There are NVME drives that do not support SATA (I have one, from Samsung), and, more importantly, there are M.2 ports that do not support SATA as well (typically secondary M.2 ports on desktop mainboards).

Also, as the benchmark shows, the NVME PCIe speed is not "diminished by the abstraction of USB" at all. NVME PCIe 4x is 36 GBit/s, SATA does 6 GBit/s!

[EarthMind]

Wow, it's nice to see that there's practically no performance hit when using a (this) USB drive. It's good for those who don't have a SATA port to spare.

But keep in mind guys, USB is a shared bus, while the (e)SATA ports individually provide up to 6Gbps bandwidth

[schmidtbag]

You are misinformed. There are NVME drives that do not support SATA (I have one, from Samsung)

I stand corrected. But still, they're uncommon.

more importantly, there are M.2 ports that do not support SATA as well (typically secondary M.2 ports on desktop mainboards).

That I'm aware of, though, typically those ports aren't used for NVMe drives either. Most of the time, SSDs use the M key.

Also, as the benchmark shows, the NVME PCIe speed is not "diminished by the abstraction of USB" at all. NVME PCIe 4x is 36 GBit/s, SATA does 6 GBit/s!

Diminished!=eliminated. Also keep in mind I was saying the PCIe lanes of a NVMe drive would have diminished performance over USB, which the article has shown can happen.

[torsionbar28]

But keep in mind guys, USB is a shared bus, while the (e)SATA ports individually provide up to 6Gbps bandwidth

For the onboard implementations, yes. There are add-in cards available however, that provide multiple busses. Sonnet makes one that has four busses with four ports, essentially giving you point-to-point topology just like sata.

[gsedej]

Can you boot from it? Does it show in bios/efi boot menu?