Was going to use it with my Mac mini, but I don’t think the paid ext4 driver supports TRIM. There’s a trial available. I uninstalled it, and put the security back on full security on the Mac mini.
If the Mac mini dies, and it’s formatted as APFS, reading it might be challenging. There might be a way, but I’m way too lazy to look it up. The kernel doesn’t have APFS support enabled, so I need a custom kernel? No thanks.
I put a Kingston NV2 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe Internal SSD in it. For USB it should be fine, apparently after you fill it up, the write speed decreases, it’s USB so who cares.
KDiskMark (3.1.2): https://github.com/JonMagon/KDiskMark
Flexible I/O Tester (fio-3.33): https://github.com/axboe/fio
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
[Read]
Sequential 1 MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 841.750 MB/s [ 822.0 IOPS] < 9697.37 us>
Sequential 128 KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 550.141 MB/s [ 4298.0 IOPS] < 7439.93 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 13.509 MB/s [ 3378.3 IOPS] < 37084.04 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 27.277 MB/s [ 6819.3 IOPS] < 145.97 us>
[Write]
Sequential 1 MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 874.840 MB/s [ 854.3 IOPS] < 8992.19 us>
Sequential 128 KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 567.175 MB/s [ 4431.1 IOPS] < 7164.86 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 16.348 MB/s [ 4088.2 IOPS] < 30577.87 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 33.294 MB/s [ 8323.7 IOPS] < 118.17 us>
Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Measure: 5 sec / Interval: 5 sec]
Date: 2023-01-09 19:38:54
OS: opensuse-tumbleweed 20230108 [linux 6.1.3-1-default]
And don’t ask me how the write speed is faster. Usually it’s the other way around. That’s plugged into the Type-C port on the back of my motherboard.
To get the above speeds, make sure the drive is connected @ 10000M. When I ejected it, and unplugged it and back in, only 5000M. Had to unplug and plug back in again. lsusb -t will tell you the speed it’s connected at.
I think the highest temperature I got was 40C on Linux desktop, can’t read temperature sensor in macOS. It’s macOS 12, I’m not updating it anytime soon. Another reason to not to use the Mac mini.
It stayed under 35C when copying my pics folder to it. I used the thermal pads, even though a review says you’ll damage it, probably not the SSD I used, it has a sticker over the chips. I’ll ruin the sticker possibly.
Probably didn’t really need it though. I only have my pics and Music on it. Not sure I want it the primary disk for my pics and music. Some say USB isn’t reliable. Would suck if the pics got corrupted, and no good backup existed.
Oh review on enclosure also says the cables it come with are no good. So perhaps a different cable will always connect at the right speed. I probably won’t buy a different cable though. Why bother? What USB speed does my other C cable do? It’s the one for my SATA enclosure.
Now I might buy a new cable, if I reboot and notice it’s slow. But I probably won’t notice, since I won’t run a benchmark, or run lsusb -t.
You don’t want your file system proprietary, unless you have more then one proprietary computer. Well, the iPad might be able to read it. If I need to access all my drives on the Mac mini, I can buy the ext4 driver. Or use the free one, and read only.
In the future, Linux may be ready for M1 Macs. So I can just ditch macOS all together. Or put Linux on that external SSD. Considering I may put nothing else on the drive, it doesn’t matter what I do with it. 1.5 TB free.
The cables are short, luckily it can still sit on the top of my case.
There’s some other enclosure that might let you see the temperature in macOS. It was on Reddit, and I forgot what it’s called. It might be USB4 and Thunderbolt. So faster.
If I had a heatsink, I could have just put this inside my computer, and move the games to it. But the current games drive, has it’s own heatsink, so may not fit in enclosure, and I’m not removing it’s heatsink. Also, the write speed should be fine on the current games drive, if it ever gets completely full. It’s only PCIe 3.0 I think, and the write speed is I think faster then my Crucial PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Crucial has a much faster read speed though. I must not have bought it for the write speed. And mostly read on that drive anyways. Crucial seems to be reliable, the main reason I bought the one I did.
The ADATA SSDs with a heatsink might be reliable enough. That games drive isn’t backed up, the saves for the games are though. Might take a while to back that drive up to the external NVMe SSD. I’d rather use a mechanical drive for backing it up. They are cheaper.
I could fill it up with porn, of myself. With the head replaced, with a woman head generated with Stable Diffusion, from my own head.
I think TRIM works automatically in openSUSE. You apparently shouldn’t use discard mount option.
If I ever run out of space on my internal games drive, I can then add that drive to Steam, and install more games I’ll never play.
Update
KDiskMark (3.1.2): https://github.com/JonMagon/KDiskMark
Flexible I/O Tester (fio-3.33): https://github.com/axboe/fio
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
[Read]
Sequential 1 MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 899.911 MB/s [ 878.8 IOPS] < 9046.62 us>
Sequential 128 KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 845.219 MB/s [ 6603.3 IOPS] < 4819.82 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 12.869 MB/s [ 3218.3 IOPS] < 48368.35 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 27.768 MB/s [ 6942.0 IOPS] < 143.39 us>
[Write]
Sequential 1 MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 869.938 MB/s [ 849.5 IOPS] < 9013.61 us>
Sequential 128 KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 564.985 MB/s [ 4413.9 IOPS] < 7176.05 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 16.326 MB/s [ 4082.8 IOPS] < 30572.62 us>
Random 4 KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 33.252 MB/s [ 8313.3 IOPS] < 118.15 us>
Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Measure: 5 sec / Interval: 5 sec]
Date: 2023-01-10 12:32:07
OS: opensuse-tumbleweed 20230109 [linux 6.1.3-1-default]
Can’t tell you why the read speed is better with that benchmark. Don’t think I rebooted the computer. I did update some stuff, and logout, and back in. Perhaps KDE was indexing the drive or something. You use smartctl in Linux to get the temperature, doesn’t work in macOS, even after installing it with Homebrew. macOS thinks it doesn’t support SMART. Good luck fixing macOS.
Nice HTML Hugo or whatever this site is using. It’s messing the JavaScript code highlighter up, and yes, I’m too lazy to use Hugo’s code highlighting, if it does so. Also, way too lazy to edit old posts.
Update #2
If you copy over 70 GB, it gets hot, 54C I think it was when I checked. Running a benchmark to see if it gets hotter. The temperature seems to be going down still. Seems hot for copying @ 130.599 MiB/s. Copying from a 1 TB mechanical drive, so I can delete stuff from it. I know it was hot, cause I touched the drive.
PCIe 4.0 drives run hot, but I think because of the speed, it can’t get the max speeds. So perhaps the enclosure is useless. Remove the top I guess. Need more data to copy to it, apparently a benchmark doesn’t make it that hot. Copying more data, but might be less then 20 GB worth of data. I’m sure I can find more to copy after. Seeing if I can fry the SSD.
Only two degrees more then the hottest my Crucial SSD got. That’s PCIe 4.0 too. And I think it has a heatsink on it.
Still not that hot. And two rclone’s running. Maybe a benchmark too, will get it back up to 54C.
The macOS SSD benchmark I have, runs until you stop it. That’s the easiest way to test it. Too bad no ext4 support in macOS with TRIM support.
I think I might know why it’s getting hot, the SSD might not be making contact with the top of enclosure. Probably pushed it too far down. Where the rubber thing is, that secures it in place. Should probably wait till it’s done copying to fix it. And don’t think that really matters. But it was upside down, that might matter, if it’s sitting on a surface. Under 40C now, and might be cooler then without the top part of enclosure on. The fucking cable won’t let it lay flat on my case.
Only got it up to 41C. Ahh 42C. The two rclones are still running. And 43C, then back down.
Well, I think the drive is fine now, 33C, still copying a bunch of data, mechanical drives are slow.