DIY External SSD Drives

[Dave Rice]

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

 

 

[Dave Rice]

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.

[Ed P]

External Drives and Confession Time – I’ve just wasted 12 hours because I accidentally made an external 8TB hard drive into a 2Gb uefi boot in a stupid attempt to make a recovery disk! Boy what a palaver. I vaguely remembered Dave saying that uefi can make you go through hoops, but I had to do it as I couldn’t afford to lose an 8TB disk.

Cut a long story short, if anyone else makes the same stupid mistake then use GParted, unmount the external drive then erase it followed by partitioning it as GPT. (I could not find this simple method on line, but it must be somewhere!)

[Dave Rice]

GParted is for when the going gets tough, it’ll sort anything out, but of course can get you in trouble just as quick!

[keith with the teef]

Thats a neat little enclosure. Certainly a good way of putting old SSD’s to new purpose.

I see you can get 2TB M.2′ s now for about £140. Its like the stuff of wee childrens dreams.

[Ed P]

I gather that Western have had a major manufacturing upset that has contaminated a very significant proportion of their Flash NAND (which in turn means 6.5 billion gigabytes of the world’s supply has gone down the drain.). If you have a foreseeable requirement for SSD kit, it might be worthwhile pre-purchasing a chunk.

link to article

[Dave Rice]

Yes I saw that too, not good news.

Sale on Amazon, Samsung T7 Portable SSD Mettallic Red 1 TB £99

read/write speeds up to 1. 050 MB/s or 1. 000 MB/s with USB 3.1 Gen 2

[Dave Rice]

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.

[keith with the teef]

I just got a new monitor its a: viewsonic, VX3276-MHD-3, IPS, 32″, 75hz, 1080p, 1200nits HDR it has a high PPI so there is no need IMO to go above 1080P. High PPI=real good for editing photos.

Also we live in a gaming monitor dystopia which every one wins except the end user. Do I need 4k 240hz and a 3090ti? Er

Err, No!.

Spoiler alert: I had to send the first one back due to excessive IPS bleed. The one I have now is OK but not brill. It may be due to the bezel being only 7MM thick or not stored properly or summat.

The only time I see a small amount of IPS bleed is the initial black splash screen at boot..

 

[keith with the teef]

In addition to the above post. When I test the viewsonic with: https: https://backlightbleedtest.org/

Its a genuine pass and so the monitor is a keeper.

[Ed P]

Not that you care atm, but the 11357G is Win 11 compatible so you should not fall into the Intel i5 trap.

Apparent list of compatible Intel processors:-

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/553587/windows-11-intel-core-i5-processor-support.html

[Dave Rice]

I still think the W11 requirements are pants.

One thing I’ve learned, the hard way, is that since build 1703 MS automatically encrypt your drive(s) if you have a TPM. If you log in with an MS account it saves the key to your account, if you don’t you’re on your own but there are no warnings whatsoever.

The CAD Lad with the R9 Thinkbook did the right thing and let the Lenovo Vantage software update his drivers including the BIOS. Unfortunately it wiped the TPM (not supposed to but I have seen it before) and on the next boot it asked for the key to a drive neither of us knew had been encrypted.

I set up Acronis to image the system drive daily so there is a backup, but I fear one of two things:

• The D: drive is also encrypted so I’ll not be able to get at the backups
• It will restore C: in an encrypted state.

It’s in the workshop to be looked at tomorrow and I think I’ll be flattening both drives and starting again.

Thanks for that Teefs, 32″ is too much for me so I’ve ordered my tried and trusted BenQ GW2480 24 Inch  with speakers. I’ll try that bleed test software.

This new laptop great, almost set up, just a few more software licenses to transfer and backups to set up and it’s done.

[JayCeeDee]

Dave Rice wrote:

………..my tried and trusted BenQ GW2480 24 Inch  with speakers

 

I’ve had an early version of the near identical BenQ GW2406Z for 5 years now and three or more years ago I matched it with a second. Only real difference is my ones don’t have the speakers, but I have to say they have been brilliant.

Once I get both my Thunderbird setups matched – I had to send a few emails from my new setup as the scanner wasn’t playing ball on my old one – I’ll set it all back to my dual monitor setup and start with the NAS.

It has proved itself now as fast, efficient and reliable.👍👍

I’ve been thinking about adding a TPM module to future proof it, but the background processes Dave refers to seem to make that a risky option. I’ll leave well alone for now.

[Dave Rice]

No need, it’s built into the CPU and just needs turning on in the BIOS.

It’s only at clean installation time that it auto-encrypts the drive. On a third party site I’ve read that with a local account it’s supposed to encrypt the drive but not arm it. Sounds like rubbish to me. How can you encrypt a drive but still read it until you flick a switch? It’s encrypted or it isn’t. I’ve found a warning on the Lenovo site but it’s in the “Why has this happened to me?” section rather than if you buy a system from us then this will happen so do that.

[JayCeeDee]

iirc when I was looking through the uefi on setup, I saw the tpm option and ( hopefully ) didn’t activate it – thinking was I’d leave it till I got the module!!

I know Business is M$’s cash cow, but home users ( or businesses without a dedicated IT Department ) must be the majority of users – why complicate it in the background without letting people opt in/out first??

EDIT – I’ just looked under Device Security/Security processor details and it shows TPM status as not ready.

[Ed P]

As Dave said, if you do not do a clean install then whether or not you encrypt the drive is up to you. I turned on TPM but left Bitlocker well alone as I could see problems with having an encrypted drive. However, the following Dell ‘how-to’ shows that my fears MAY have been ill-founded.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-uk/000125409/how-to-enable-or-disable-bitlocker-with-tpm-in-windows

[JayCeeDee]

Ed P wrote:

As Dave said, if you do not do a clean install then whether or not you encrypt the drive is up to you.

This was the first clean install on my new setup – but as I thought, I hadn’t enabled TPM in UEFI at the start.

[Dave Rice]

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.

 

[Ed P]

I know what you mean about Windows 11. I guess it is the modern trend to dumb-down PCs and make it much harder to get into areas where you might break them. Windows 11 versus earlier versions is a bit like Yanks versus Brits, it looks familiar and even nearly speaks the same language, but under the skin it is a very different animal.

Once you get use to it, there are some aspects that are quite nice – File Explorer for example has well placed  little *smart icons for common file actions that are often faster to use than the keyboard commands. The Settings menu is also much better though I still find myself reverting to the Control Panel for the more nuclear options such as program removal. Win11 does however have a surprisingly long learning curve as a result of being similar but very different to earlier versions.

*smart, in so far as for example ‘paste’ only lights up if there is something in the copy buffer.

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