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Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. The old SATA SSD form factor is dead an

by mxfh 4mo ago

Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand. You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed. 36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32

wao0uuno 4mo ago
>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data. >The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. That's true and very unfortunate.
- MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
  I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.
  - wao0uuno 4mo ago
    Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.
    - MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
      PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.
- Koshkin 4mo ago
  > buying a single large capacity drive Now that's a terrible idea. You shouldn't trust any single device with terabytes of your data, regardless of whether it is low-cost or Chinese.

by mxfh 4mo ago

wao0uuno 4mo ago

>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data. >The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. That's true and very unfortunate.

MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.
- wao0uuno 4mo ago
  Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.
  - MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
    PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.
Koshkin 4mo ago
> buying a single large capacity drive Now that's a terrible idea. You shouldn't trust any single device with terabytes of your data, regardless of whether it is low-cost or Chinese.