[PLUG] Need new solid state drives

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 22:02:34 -0700
Ben Koenig <techkoenig at gmail.com> dijo:

>You are opening a can of worms looking at NVMe drives for this use
>case. NVMe and PCIe storage in general is still in a state of flux and
>subject to change. Hotplug support hasn't even been standardized yet
>so there are things that just don't exist yet for end users.  There's
>also a mess of compliance issues with different drives. Many SSD's
>don't behave as you expect from the advertising material.

You make a good point about NVMe drives, but it's what I need. I should
add that my laptop has a 1TB NVMe drive for / and /home, and I recently
installed another NVMe drive. My desktop also has only NVMe drives. And
I've never had a problem with any of them. Yes, the world of NVMe
is a tricky one because of all the varying standards, but I'm in no
rush and I will always buy from someone where I can return the product
if it doesn't work. I don't know how long it will take, but spinning
disks are eventually going to go away.

I don't mind occasionally being on the cutting edge. I bought my
vehicle brand new 24 years ago and it still runs the same as it did
then. I don't feel a need to buy a new one because it wouldn't get me
where I'm going any faster or more comfortably. (Although I do keep
eyeing electrics and self-driving cars.) But my computers are a
different matter. Just five years ago I had a few files of over 1GB
size, and today I have probably close to a hundred that are over 20GB.
Moving those things on and off of spinning disks takes a lot of time.

>Thunderbolt is also an issue in and of itself. Generally speaking, 
>Thunderbolt is considered a dead protocol and will probably end up in 
>the same place as firewire and eSATA. I recommend against it.

Thunderbolt 3 is the best speed I can get at the moment, and it will
not be surpassed easily for some time to come. Yeah, there's 10G
ethernet, but I don't want to re-wire my house, and Thunderbolt 3 is
still faster. My computer came with a Thunderbolt 3 port that I have
connected to a dock that has ports for ethernet, multiple video, and
even various USB3 ports. In three to five years I'll probably be ready
to move on to something else, so I just need Thunderbolt to work for
that long. By then I'll probably be buying a new computer with who knows
what kind of connections. You're welcome to dislike Thunderbolt 3 if
you like, but is hard to beat for DAS.

>You probably just need a 2 or 4 bay SATA enclosure that implements
>RAID. Either Direct Attached (DAS) or Network Attached (NAS) depending
>on how you intend to use it. If you want I could make a recommendation
>but full disclosure - I work for one of the companies that sells this
>type of gear so I'm going to be biased ;-)

I have a SATA3 RAID0 DAS in a Mediasonic enclosure now, and it's too
slow. Why should I replace it with something that's just as slow? Oh
wait ... slow stuff is cheap. Well, I can afford it.