[PLUG] Need new solid state drives

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 17:23:57 -0500
Bill Barry <bill at billbarry.org> dijo:

>On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 5:16 PM Tomas Kuchta
><tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you are using full bells and whistles 40Gb TB3 you are limited to
>> 4 shared PCI lanes for all the NVMe's in the enclosure.
>>
>> Given the price and the purpose of these PCIe storage arrays, it
>> seems to make sense to have them on PCIe 16x cards otherwise you
>> cannot access them at their native speeds and they might just as
>> well use much cheaper 4xSATA/SAS hangout ng of PCIe3 4x.

>To say it again,  another factor you need to consider is whether or
>not your ssd drives are PCIe3 or PCIe 4. It can make a big difference
>in transfer speed. I know that you can now get PCIe4 on motherboards,
>but I don't know anything about external enclosures.
>
>https://www.techspot.com/review/1893-pcie-4-vs-pcie-3-ssd/

Thanks for the link, very interesting.

I should add something about my motivations for doing this. My current
setup has a 6TB and an 8TB WD red drive in a RAID0 array, and when I use
the file manager to look for something I have to sit and wait for up to
a full minute while the drives grind away. And then when I finally find
the file and try to move it somewhere else I have to wait for the
drives again. Every day I spend 10 to 30 minutes waiting on these
drives. I'm tired of it, and with my ever decreasing remaining lifespan
I'd rather part with some cash to improve things. Plus, the existing
drives are getting kind of old, so I really ought to replace them
anyway.

Now, while I lust for speed, I don't need the fastest currently
available. I don't feel compelled to get PCIe-4, and I'm not sure that
even having 16 lanes available is essential. I do kind of like the 8TB
Sabrent Rocket, but I'd need three of them, and at ~$1500 each, that's
a fair chunk of cash. Plus, I don't know what kind of case could hold
them - they're huge! (But the picture of one of them on Newegg's
website looks like an ordinary NVMe drive.)

Really, my biggest obstacle is finding a Thunderbolt 3 case. There are
quite a few out there, but they hold just one drive. My current array
is USB3, Gen1, so even if I went to USB Gen2 I bet I wouldn't see that
much improvement. If I'm going to solid state drives it only makes
sense to get decent bandwidth.