What to do with 2x NVMe SSD drives?

Hardware
,
1

I have a couple of WD Black SN750 1T drives that I bought for other projects, and now they’re just sitting in my NAS as cache, but not being used as such (apparently cache on a 918+ is ill-advised).
So I don’t know what to do with them.
Ideally, I would be able to RAID the two in a single enclosure, but the only one I’ve found is expensive.
And I don’t want to spend a lot for individual enclosures for them.

Suggestions? Any products I may have missed?

2

I bought an enclosure from Amazon for external storage for mine on my Mac mini, think it was about £30, Been fine but I guess it depends if you have a use for it - I only got 256 onboard so needed the extra space for software and wanted nvme for games speed.

It’s usb c rather than tb3 but the speed is decent enough.

USB Type C M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps Solid State Drive Aluminum External Casing, Unique Cooling Fin Design for Good Heat Dissipation https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07RZBTNTN/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_6.88Eb1MAQEBJ

1 Like
3

There’s this: Orico Aluminum Dual Bay M.2 external hard drive enclosure but it’s USB 3.1 Gen2, not Thunderbolt 3.

I’ve looked in the past for such an enclosure – overheating seems to be a major obstacle.

Also,

That OWC model only gives you full speeds if you fill all four bays. From a review of the enclosure:

Each of the 4 m.2 pcnvme slots have only 1 pci express lane. This means that the drive in the slot is limited to 8Gbit transfer speeds.

If you populate all 4 slots and use the included softraid software you will be able to reach the announced speed of 2600Mbyte/sec speed but with fewer drives you will loose out on speed.

So, for full speed, you’d need to drop $300 more on two more sticks, plus the enclosure price.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the detailed reply!

1 Like
5

I forgot to add in my post, “Buy the OWC and extra sticks and let us know how awesome it is!”

1 Like
6

Um, no :slight_smile: That would be an additional ~$600 for only 4T total storage.

I already broke the bank on a Sabrent Rocket (I bought the older model for $400, and they replaced it under warranty with the newer model.)

1 Like