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The 2.5″ 500GB Maxtor USB drive has been in my bag for at least 4 years now and has seen some action. Whilst I don’t think it’s going to expire any time soon, it’s reached the age where you start to wonder and I need reliability. I also don’t need 500GB. So I’ve been looking at external 250GB SSDs.
Yes you can now get them off the shelf for reasonable prices, but I like to know what’s in there and how robust they are. So here’s what I’ve been up to with their Crystal Disk scores using my 3 1/2 year old Kingston A400 480GB for reference.
The Kingston cost me £75 at the time, which I thought was reasonable. These days I’d be spending about half that and it would be M2.
Multibao USB 3.0 to SATA External HDD Hard Drive For 2.5″ Inch HDD/SSD Enclosure Caddy Metal Case Box Black £7
Silicon Power SSD 256GB 3D NAND A55 SLC Cache Performance Boost 2.5 inch SATA III 7mm (0.28″) Internal Solid State Drive £24
FIDECO M.2 NVME SATA SSD Enclosure, PCIe USB 3.1, Gen2 SSD Adapter with 10Gbps Transfer Rate, Hard Drive Enclosure for 2230 2242 2260 2280 M.2 NVME/SATA SSD of M-Key or M+B Key, Support UASP £24
Integral 256GB M.2 SATA III 2280 Internal SSD, up to 500MB/s Read 400MB/s Write £28
It used to be that you had to buy a large SSD to get the best performance. Looks like those days have gone and these SSDs are firmly in the budget category.
Both of the enclosures are metal and very robust, but the one I’ll be keeping is the M2. Largely because it also supports both types of M2 drive. If you’re happy to stick to SATA M2 drives you can get an aluminium enclosure for £15
Part Two. I’m going to need some sort of caddy which can easily swap out the M2 drives. The Fideco enclosure mentioned above is incredibly robust, perfect for the work bag, but also incredibly fiddly.
You put a threaded donut shaped nut in the end of the drive and then insert in a bolt to hold it down. The problem is the drive naturally wants to spring up, the nut wants to fall out and the bolt is tiny. You need three hands and I had to get the Mrs to help. They do provide spare bolts as if you drop one it’s gone forever.
I found this enclosure for £21 that’s tool free for standard 2280 drives but has got the same internals, which I know are OK.
Couldn’t be easier, and whilst it looks good it’s all plastic and I don’t think would last long in rough and tumble of the work bag. But that won’t be it’s job, it’ll not leave the work bench.
To test it I used one of the first cheap M2 drives I bought some 18 months ago. The price hasn’t changed but the speeds of cheap and cheerful certainly have. This seems truly dreadful now.
A new record for me, Crucial P5 Plus Gen 4 £66
As I’d hoped, this Mid January to Mid February has been very busy with labour intensive work (it usually is) meaning I’ve earned enough to replace my 5 1/2 yo Lenovo V110 laptop.
There are some cracking Lenovo deals about at the moment, and this one caught my eye Lenovo ThinkBook 15 G2 Intel Core i5-1135G7 Iris® Xe Graphics 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Windows 10 Home 15.6″ at Box, £505 after cashback. and £69 for a 3 year onsite warranty.
I’ve spend another £100 on an extra 8GB ram and that P5 which has brought me up to a spec the same as the £830 Ryzen 7 version (probably a bit better). The original SSD is no slouch, about half those benchmarks, but I really needed 512GB and the P5 is a no-brainer. I have put the original drive in the second M2 slot but it’s hobbled by being Gen 3 so I may swap it out for one of the cheap M2’s mentioned above.
The Thinkbook is designed as the poor mans Thinkpad. The build quality is there but the materials are not quite, but flipping heck they’re right up there and as good as you’ll get at this price (the screen is aluminium, the bottom ABS).
It has Type-C charging and a Thunderbolt port next to it that also takes charging, so you can be using your fast USB Gen 3.2 device or your Thunderbolt and still be plugged in. One of the two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports is always on so you can charge your phone while the laptop is off. Wi-Fi 6, 802.11ax 2×2 Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 5.1 + Gigabit Ethernet port.
With a headphone socket, an SD card reader and fingerprint sensor in the power button it really has everything. Best laptop I’ve ever owned by a mile. Treated myself to a Logitech MS mouse too as this all has to last me 5 years and will probably be my last work purchase. Along with my Ryzen 5 3600 desktop (needs a new IPS monitor), I think I’m done. Ha ha. Not a chance.
I really don’t have any issues with Bitlocker, often using it on USB drives, it’s the fact that it was done behind my back and I didn’t get a chance to save the key before it was needed.
I checked the Lenovo Ideapad I set up for his Mrs, which would have been an ideal candidate, and it was untouched. I couldn’t delve too deeply as this was a remote session. It maybe that aimed at “home” use the TPM wasn’t enabled and on our business orientated Thinkbooks it was. Whatever, I am now forewarned.
I don’t know what’s up with my customers, one of them has bought Surface 8 and I had issues logging into his MS Account, so it set up a local account and Bitlocker looks like this:
But it is Windows 11 and not 10. I hate it already, if I wanted a Mac UI I’d buy a Mac. The onscreen keyboard drives me nuts, so much so I put AnyDesk straight on it and have been remoting from my own machines to set it up. It really needs that expensive add-on keyboard IMO.
The key components are identical to my Thinkbook:
i5 1135G7 , Intel WiFi 6 AX201 and the 512GB version of the 256GB SK Hynix (although not in M2 format) and benchmarks identically. There is clearly an Intel hardware “pack” for this level of performance as the Ideapads are the same. So he’s paid twice the £ to have it in a tablet format, but the build quality is outstanding and the screen is magnificent. It is a bit heavy for a tablet though.
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