New backup drive question

[Max Arwood]

Mother board is an 

AsusTeK P8Z68-V PRO Gen 3

I want to buy a 2tb drive. I have a seagate sata 2tb SSD but I would hate to buy another because it almost looks like they are being phased out for the newer drives. I don’t think my MB has a slot for the faster NVMe drives.  I have an external sata port. I was hoping to find some type adapter to run a NVMe usb c drive on that SATA port. I was also looking at some of the enclosures. That seemed like a great idea. This way as I bought more NCMe’s I could just plug them in and would not be buying older technology. I do not have a usb C this computer only has USB 3.…,,

or should I just get a giant spinner. 
I have 3-2 TB drives in the computer. I have 1-6tb usb3 backup drive and 6+ 2TB  spinners. I had a 3YB that just bit the dust. I hope I can revive it. 
Thanks for any suggestions. 
 

[MozartMan]

I use NVMe drive as backup and use this enclosure:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MNFH1PX/

Works great.

[Max Arwood]

Thanks a bunch! Wow that price is super. I saw it has a USB 3 cable! Nice. Do you have USB 3 or C. What model drive do you use with it.  Is it backup or sample storage? I was looking at a 2 drive bay. I though it might be good to move stuff around. 

[mettelus]

Be sure to look at the manual on that MB. The SATA connectors are actually a mish-mash, and I had the P8Z67 in my 2600K. The 2 Grey ones can reach SATA 3 speeds (6Gbps), but the 4 Blue ones are SATA 2 (3Gbps). Those are described on pages 2-21 and 2-23 respectively. They will still support SSDs (your better option), but you will not be able to get anything close to NVMe speeds even with a connector. It is also preferred to plug the two most-used drives into the Grey SATA connections on that MB (C drive and the most used program/data drive). A quick check on that manual seems setting the two grey ones to SATA 3 will disable 2 of the Blue connectors, but I forget offhand. I am "assuming" that external SATA port is a SATA 2, so again the data speed is going to be limited to 3Gbps and an SSD would be better bang for the buck.

I carried a 3TB spinner HDD forward from that machine for backups and use external HDDs for backups as well, mostly because SSDs tend to catastrophically fail when they go down. I have not had that happen (yet) and their longevity has gone up substantially, but it is something to keep in mind for backups.

[Max Arwood]

mettelus - Thanks. Just didn't want to buy older drives. I'm still slightly thinking about getting a big spinner. If I got another 6tb I could do 2 full sets of backups. It's only $159 newegg.

MozartMan  - Thanks for the reply!

My samples are on a spinner now.  I have to decide to move the samples to an SSD or get the 6TB and have 2 sets of backups.

[MozartMan]

On 3/14/2024 at 10:33 PM, Max Arwood said:

Do you have USB 3 or C. What model drive do you use with it.  Is it backup or sample storage? 

I use blue USB 3 port in my PC. I have Inland Performance Plus 1 TB NVMe SSD in that enclosure that I linked to. I use it as the 1st backup drive.  The speed is amazing. Inland is Micro Center brand.

My 2nd backup drive is 4TB WD spinner.

Edited March 17, 2024 by MozartMan

[MozartMan]

On 3/15/2024 at 2:03 AM, Max Arwood said:

MozartMan  - Thanks for the reply!

You are welcome.

[Starship Krupa]

Your motherboard doesn't have an M2 slot, but it might be able to accept a PCIe M2 adapter. You wouldn't be able to boot from the drive, but if what you want to do is only invest in technology you can make good use of in a future build, it's worth investigating.

I used this method to install an M2 drive in my i7 3770 Dell, and even did eventually hack the firmware to allow the system to recognize it as a bootable drive.

If all you want to do is back your system up, the big spinner is the way to go.

[Jim Roseberry]

Hi Max,

 

If you're looking for maximum performance:

As was previously mentioned, get a PCIe host card for an M.2 SSD (make sure it supports 4 PCIe lanes).

Install the PCIe host card in one of the full-length PCIe slots (requires 4 PCIe lanes).

This will yield the full speed of the M.2 SSD.

 

If you've got a M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD that sustains 7000MB/Sec:

If you put that M.2 SSD in an external USB enclosure, it's not going to yield the full speed of the drive.

• USB-3 tops out at about 550MB/Sec (which is about the same speed as a SATA SSD)
• USB-3.2 Gen1 tops out at about 1250MB/Sec
• USB-3.2 Gen2 tops out at about 2600MB/Sec

With Thunderbolt external enclosure, you'll see about 2700MB/Sec

With USB-3.2 Gen2 enclosure (20Gbps), you'll see about 2600MB/Sec

With USB-3.2 Gen1 enclosure (10Gbps), you'll see about 1250MB/Sec

Connect either USB-3.2 enclosure to USB-3... and it'll limit maximum speed to about 550MB/Sec. 

Edited April 9, 2024 by Jim Roseberry