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How fast will an SSD perform in an external enclosure?

goldfritter

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I have a use-case where having an external drive that is significantly faster than a normal 2.5" 5400 RPM HDD would save me a lot of time.

I also have a 2TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD that would be perfect for the job.

My question is, is it worth buying an external enclosure for my existing drive? Has anyone ever done this and tested the speed? It doesn't need to be full SATA speed, just a lot faster than the HDD. Or is my only option getting a purpose built external SSD?

Also, if I do end up getting an enclosure, which one should I get? I'm pretty sure I'd be limited to USB 3.0 so let's go with that for now.

Thanks for the help as always!
 
This depends on a lot of factors actually.
As a test I just did a copy of a 5GB file to a USB3 enclosed 2.5" 7200rpm mechanical HDD and got about 140MB per sec.
A 5400rpm HDD could only do 38MBps on the same enclosure.
Same file to an SSD on the same enclosure pushed that to about 310MB per sec.

The main factors here are:
Throughput speed of the source (the drive you're copying from)
File size and number (more files will take much longer than less files of the same total size, 5x 1GB files copy faster than 10x 500MB files)
Throughput speed of the controller on both the board and the external enclosure. If you are copying from USB to USB on the same controller on the board, you will get terrible speeds.
Speed of drive on the controller. Most SSDs outperform USB3.0 so should not be an issue but there are big differences in speed between all the HDDs out there.

I used an Orico USB 3 enclosure I got from Raru for R199.
 
HDD sentinel tells me that the SSD runs at 80% performance when I use it in a USB3.0 enclosure.

SSD models used: Sandisk, Kingston and even Apacer

Enclosures: Orico and Baobab

Assuming a Read and Write test will give you some numeric values
 
@nephilm @Nemo415 @Lianesch

Thanks guys, your input is very helpful. Looks like putting the SSD in an enclosure will significantly improve performance in this context, and I don't need to splurge on a purpose-built external SSD.
 
Update for anyone who is interested. I got this enclosure: takealot.com

Installation was very simple, truly a plug-and-play experience.

I ran some benchmarks. Sustained read/writes were about 70-80% as fast in the enclosure as when connected directly to the mobo. Random were almost the same as SATA.

In terms of the user experience (video editing), it's night and day. It's so much better than working with a standard 5400 RPM external drive. And I wouldn't say it's noticeably slower than using the SSD as an internal SATA drive.

So overall it was a successful experiment. And take heed, video editors - if you need to work on an external drive, getting a 2.5" SATA SSD and sticking it in a basic enclosure can really improve your workflow.

Thanks for the help, all.
 

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