Crucial P2 1TB NVMe drive in External USB 3.2 enclousure  

Decided i wanted to play around with an NVMe drive in an external USB 3.2 enclosure. I bought the following combo. Got the enclosure for $21.99 at Amazon and got the 1TB Crucial P2 NVMe solid state drive for $79 at RogueCast.com.



For this project, having the world's fastest PCI Express NVMe drive was not necessary as the speed of the drive is going to be significantly impacted by the USB 3.2 interface. Therefore the price and performance ratio for this Crucial drive was excellent.

I slid the cover off the enclosure, and put in the NVMe drive with the little rubber holder at the screw end.


Once it was together, I plugged it into the front USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-C port on my case.


Ran Crystal Disk Mark against the drive and am super happy with the results. Nearly 2x as fast as an internal SATA based SSD and totally portable.



Anyway, thought that I would share in case somebody is thinking about putting together a small portable external drive and feels $100 for is reasonable for 1TB of space, and nearly 1,000MB/sec transfer rate.

Edit: I did try plugging in the USB-c to USB-A cable that the kit came with and plugged that into a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port on my Asus Rog Strix X570-E mobo, and got the same results.

Very nice. Thanks for sharing

Could you fill the drive to at least 80% and benchmark it again?

The potential problem with this type of enclosures is how good they are at heat dissipation, under long writing operations. If they fail to transfer heat efficiently out of the SSD, it will slow down or enter read-only mode, until the temperature drops to safe values.

Anibor said:

The potential problem with this type of enclosures is how good they are at heat dissipation, under long writing operations. If they fail to transfer heat efficiently out of the SSD, it will slow down or enter read-only mode, until the temperature drops to safe values.

I ran a 15 minute continuous write from Macrium today to the drive and the enclosure itself was only slightly warm to the touch.

I haven't had any heat related issues with it.

pparks1 said:

I ran a 15 minute continuous write from Macrium today to the drive and the enclosure itself was only slightly warm to the touch.

I haven't had any heat related issues with it.

Check to see if the enclosure supports trim using the "Trim Check" utility found somewhere in this forum. I use Startech Enclosures that support trim.

pparks1 said:

I ran a 15 minute continuous write from Macrium today to the drive and the enclosure itself was only slightly warm to the touch. I haven't had any heat related issues with it.

The temperature, SMART parameters and other information can be seen using Hard Disk Sentinel. I have a similar enclosure (Sabrent), the highest temp recorded has been 44C.

Trim can also be checked and executed from Windows Settings > System > Storage > Optimize units.

I was able to issue the following command in an elevated powershell prompt to trim the drive
optimize-volume -DriveLetter G -ReTrim -Verbose


Also ran an analyze command against the drive after the above
​

Windows shows the following under Windows Settings > System > Storage > Optimize Drives



So, looks like Trim indeed works with this enclosure.

I did find this Trim Check utility, but I didn't download and install it
GitHub - CyberShadow/trimcheck: SSD TRIM check tool for Windows

Very good price for the combo.
Normally the bottle neck of a USB flash drive is the drive.
On your USB 3.2 + NVMe combo the bottle neck is the communication device as the 1TB Crucial P2 NVMe is rated
Max Sequential Read = Up to 2400 MBps
Max Sequential Write = Up to 1800 MBps

So the 1TB Crucial P2 NVMe it is working at half the default speed on the combo, limited by the USB 3.2