ZTC mSATA enclosure and Crucial M500 240GB mSATA powerhouse combo review

This blog covers a lot of storage reviews. I buy lots of drives of all types. There hasn't been anything lately that has gotten me excited until today.

I carry a lot of portable drives with me everyday. I carry about 5-6 USB 3.0 sticks, a few USB 3 and portable Thunderbolt drives. USB 3.0 sticks are pretty cheap and ubiquitous but they are still pretty slow. Even some of the fast ones rate around 150 MB/sec reads and 90 MB/sec writes sequentially. Random read are a mess and they'll crawl to a snail's pace when you copy thousands of small files. SSDs solve the USB 3.0 pen drive problem but they are pretty big. Well, today, I put an mSATA SSD into a micro enclosure and it was an epiphany.

(size comparison mSATA, USB, 2.5" Thunderbolt drive)

Today, I have a $20 micro mSATA enclosure made by ZTC and a Crucial M500 240GB mSATA drive. I originally bought the M500 for a NUC project I was planning but decided I didn't need another small form factor PC. Since I got the M500 at an extremely good price ($105 street), I figured if I didn't use it in a computer, why not put it in an enclosure. I checked out the reviews of the popular MyDigital Bullet mSATA enclosure but was turned off on the over-heating issues and random issues with Crucial mSATA drives. Also, I didn't want to spend to much on experimentation so I went with the ZTC which was less than $17.

Looking at the pictures, you can see it is amazingly small. There is a small circuit board and a regular micro USB 3.0 connector. It comes with a small cable which is handy. However, I have a gazillion of those cables everywhere at every job site and in all my bags that all I need is just the little drive.

Oh boy, it is a fast little, powerhouse combination.

The competing MyDigital case comes with a UASP chipset. I couldn't find any documentation on this ZTC but in the system profiler, it comes up as a JMicron controller. Regardless of who makes it, it is smoking fast. Using Black Magic Disk Speed Test, I got over 400 MB/sec reads and 260 MB/sec writes over numerous benchmarking.

Is it as portable as a USB 3.0 stick? No. However, I no longer have to carry 4-5 sticks anymore and the performance is on a whole different level. I might just spring some more money and get myself a few 480GB mSATA SSDs for my new workflow.

Need I say any more? This is a pretty powerful, portable micro combination in storage gadgetry. I can run my 100GB Virtual Machines off this combo. I'm giddy with my little toy.

Link: ZTC enclosure on Amazon

Crucial M4 512GB SSD Review

Prices of SSDs are in a free-for-all. The Crucial M4 line of SSDs are my favorite due to their reliability and SATA6 speed. I recently got myself a 512GB unit and it is fast. Have in mind, I am not a professional reviewer. I am just a pro user with specific needs. So this review is in the perspective of a normal end-user.

 

The first thing I did was pop it into my SATA6Gb/s capable ultrabay of my Thinkpad. It has the same speed and throughput as the primary SATA on-board. The operating system drive is on another Crucial M4 256GB drive. The OS is Ubuntu 12.04

So how fast is this drive? Insanely fast. Most benchmarks will give you 500Mb/s reads and 350Mb/s writes. That is what I experienced in my synthetic benchmarks.

Have in mind, most benchmarks are purely synthetic. They are either writing from memory or reading into memory.

Most day-to-day operations are copy and backups. Most setups I've seen are SSD as the boot/OS and a HDD as a secondary drive for media and other files. For example, in laptops, it is usually the SSD in the main bay and a swapped HDD in the CD bay.

If you have a SSD/HDD platter setup, your speeds will be determined by the lowest common denominator. That common denominator is most likely the traditional platter HDD. So if your platter HDD is only reading 60Mb/s, your copies will only be 60Mb/s even to a SSD.


Well, I happen to have a SSD to SSD setup. My Thinkpad is equipped with 3 SSDs. Copying Virtual Machine images from drive to drive is insanely fast. See below. I am getting 300 plus copy speeds. That is the full maximum speed of both drives (500Mb read and 350 Mb writes) with some minor overhead.

That is smoking fast! Gigabytes of files copy almost instantly. 10Gb of files takes less than a minute.


Just for fun, I tried to see what the USB3/USB2 speeds are like. I attached a USB3 Seagate Go Flex SATA to USB3 adapter.

Here are the results.

In USB 3, I can sustain 225Mb/s average speeds. USB 2 is pretty pathetic at 29 Mb/s. Also, pay close attention to the seek times. In native SATA mode, the seek times are very fast and USB3 is quite usable. USB3 is slightly slower than what I am getting with eSATA to SATA. See my eSATA-to-SATA cable post.


This just goes to show that buying a SSD and putting it inside an external enclosure is not worth it. If you do use an external enclosure, an older SATA3 SSD will more than suffice as you will never saturate the bandwidth. I have not seen a good USB 3.0 controller that is fast enough to keep up with the fastest SATA speeds.

There you have it and that is the reason why I stick with SSDs despite their high costs.
I hope you enjoyed the reading. 

Can't get enough storage

You can never get enough storage. Drives prices are getting back to normal and SSD prices are plummeting. I decided to get some Crucial M4s in 256 and 128GB varieties. Frys had a great discount Seagate Hybrid 7200 Momentus HDD/SSD cache drives so I got Best Buy to match those prices. I also got a mSATA drive for my new Thinkpad. I am thinking triple SSDs: internal 256GB Boot, 128GB in the ultrabay CD dock, and a mSata for swap/virtualmachines. Or I just do SSD boot and Momentus Hybrid drive in ultrabay.

After reading Storage Review's review of M4s in RAID 0, I may just try striping a RAID-0 with my two 128GB SSDs. Up to 900 megabytes a second!

It is like Christmas in Summer.