Gadgetory

on last week's episode of - cobble something together we made an SSD out of a bunch of micro SD cards and this PCB we bought off some Chinese site it was super dumb overall I'd say it was a waste of both time and money but not to be deterred by little things like bat we are back at it again with another DIY memory product today we will be making our own USB thumb drive will it be awesome or will it be awful I'll let you know after I tell you about the zotac mech 1 a compact desktop PC built for gaming and featuring a sleek robotic style design you can check it out at the link below okay so we've cleared away everything that we don't immediately need so let's go ahead and crack open an MS o9 this is a brand new one haven't used it yet come comes with a little screwdriver little screw comes with a little enclosure that's about it so there are other MDOT two enclosures on the market that let you turn a regular drive into an SSD but what we like about this one is that it doesn't require an external power cable in addition to the USB plug on it and it's got kind of a actually it's got kind of a nice sort of aluminum sandblasted finish on I mean everything Silverstone does kind of has a nice aluminum sandblasted finish on it but that's not that's not a terrible thing to be known for this assembly fairly straightforward oh my goodness this piece pushes this piece which has little nubbins that stick into the PCB it's the whole PCB that slides back and forth that is a that is not the least janky mechanism I have ever seen in their defense maybe they all work that way I don't know I haven't taken apart a whole lot of USB drives but that doesn't seem like the best solution all right now let's go ahead and get our MDOT to installed we picked a random m2 that we had on the shelf downstairs you can't quite go full random this particular drive right here is not compatible with nvme m2 SSD so that means that you either have to use one with a B key or a B+ M key so as long as it's one that is SATA or AHCI and it should say that somewhere on the SSD and it's 40 to 60 or 80 millimeters long it should theoretically both fit and function the other decision we have to make with respect to our SSD is which size to go with so we went with a 500 gig for a couple of reasons so yeah this little guy just kind of goes on here again this is not this is not the most amazing mounting system I've ever seen this screw goes in here then reason number one was that we figured by the time you're spending 35 bucks on just the the raw PCB and enclosure to make your own USB Drive you probably want something that's got more capacity than the you know commodity one that they were handing out at the last convention you were at and number two we wanted to see the best possible performance out of our DIY drive and higher capacity drives do have a tendency to perform a little bit better than the lower ones and you can actually get a full explanation for why that is in the tech quickie video up here oh wow why is there an extra screw anywho with all of that said I'm still not expecting to get anywhere near the speeds advertised on the Box turn gigabit per second because of an inherent limitation of the product an aged CI or a SATA m2 SSD can only go as high as six gigabit so at best the benefit we're getting from a Gen 2 chipset is another gigabit per second but I mean hey any benefit is a benefit and I'll take it it's got some performance tests going it's got some performance tests going ok so let's meet all of our contestants I'm gonna have this guy plugged in here just for convenient size comparison as we as we go through let's start with a regular old USB Drive you can see by comparison it takes up very little of the space around it and doesn't stick out nearly so far off the back of the system obviously now in terms of our tests we're gonna keep things pretty simple today and just copy a 10 gig file to and from our drives now this would not be a suitable test if this was a boot SSD but because these are just external drives and this is absolutely the intended use case it's perfectly acceptable in this context alright so out of boat 55 megabytes per second right and just shy of a hundred and forty megabytes per second reads even our commodity drive is definitely taking advantage of USB 3 versus USB 2 but it's a low capacity drive and those right speeds if you actually had you know a 500 gig drive would be pretty painful if it was a drive that you used very frequently to fill up and then offload data from because it would take you over two and a half hours to fill a 500 gig drive at these speeds even if the offload is not nearly so bad almost three times as fast let's plug in to travel to the GT now if you were gonna actually plug this directly into the back of your computer even with the skinniest possible device you can see I'm nowhere near being able to put that in there I actually can't even access the ones next to it on this side and even the type C port I cannot get into if there's like any sleeve whatsoever on the cable here so yeah that's why they include this thing so you can hang it off the back of your drive okay that's not bad right speeds are a little slow but read speeds are very good at over 350 Meg's a second so if it weren't for the cost and that it's just not much more convenient of a form factor compared even to an external drive with a dongle this would be a lot more compelling for our next trick we've got the t5 portable SSD now this has the advantage of easy access to all the ports around it and even the ability to use different connectors like if you wanted a type C a type C like the one that I have right here but the drawback is that you always need a cable that was faster than I was expecting that is more like I was expecting wait no also very very fast how did James get those other results our pre video preparation failed us we still had write caching enabled for this drive so let's go ahead and change that which for some reason requires a restart we'll be right back and thanks to the magic of video editing we are back immediately that is more like what I was expecting actually that's still better than I was expecting but this is within the realm of possibility so with results like that it's no mystery why these things have gotten so popular let's find out if our DIY SS the USB solution can compare Oh interesting so it shows up as the WD SSD but a USB device how cool not bad and read speeds are really good these are actually the best results we've seen so far Wow not too shabby bottom line then you do lose out on the ability to install regular USB S or even type C's with the extra space afforded by them on either side of it but you can easily put something even something fairly bulky right above it if you don't mind them kind of going like this a bit and in terms of performance per dollar with our HCI MDOT - it actually looks not bad oh it should be noted that your mileage may vary if you put a slower or cheaper drive in here maybe you ended up getting one of these because you had an MDOT to drive lying around from before an upgrade or something like that then your results will be different but from our perspective the big winners are really well honestly everything but this cuz these are cheap and like kind of good enough this is really compact and offers pretty darn good performance but comes at a price premium for its compactness this has a dongle but performs really well and is very affordable by comparison and then this is flexible big a little bulky but highly configurable and also reasonably affordable tunnel bear tunnel bear is the easy-to-use VPN that keeps you and your online activities private from advertisers your internet service provider or anyone looking to track you or profit from your data so whether you're trying to use services that are not available in your region or you just don't want people spying on you tunnel air makes the whole process 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