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Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find any USB4 external SSDs on Amazon; only USB 3.2.

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Wouldn't it be better to just buy an M.2 NVMe adapter, eg. ICY DOCK ICYNano MB861U31-1M2B[0]?

[0]: https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html

That doesn't seem to be USB 4?

Is there an SSD that saturates USB3.2 Gen2 speeds and requires USB4?

Many PCIe4 or 5 drives

Oh yes. Samsung 9100 Pro does 14800/13400 MiB/s over PCIe 5x4.

I bought this one when upgrading my desktop, it indeed delivers what it promises. 14.5GB/s on my tiny random desktop, it's impressive. Everything feels so instantaneous, my Linux desktop finally feels like a Mac :)

That's certainly impossible as even USB4 is only 40Gb/s~5GB/s, and of that you could only expect to get 32Gb/s~4GB/s. Or realistically even less due to overhead.

It is probably the speed of it being read into RAM.

Try entering sync right after copying to see how long it really takes

Oh I meant without USB4 enclosure ofc, PCIe5 directly. It's truly the best consumer-level SSD available around.

It beats my previous desktop's RAM speed, what a time to live in.

What you're seeing are the speeds of various multi-tier caches (RAM, intermediate SLC etc.) It cannot write to its main flash memory that fast. While it to the user looks like they just wrote 10 GiB in a single second, the SSD is internally still busy for another 10 seconds persisting that data. The actual real write speed of top-shelf consumer grade SSDs these days is somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 GiB/s. Most models top out at half of that or less.

Maybe not, but the USB consortium hasn't got around to polluting the USB4 namespace yet so it's safer to buy stuff with the USB4 label.

Of course, just give them some time and they'll come up with USB4 "gen classic" at 11 Mbps.

If Amazon is a strict requirement, then this won't help. But if you're ok with AliExpress then it's probably a win:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008555989592.html

I have one of these, though I'm using with a USB 3.x port as that's what my desktop has. For me it's working fine, and for others with actual USB 4 ports it seems to be working properly for them.

Really? I see plenty when I search for 'usb4 nvme enclosure'

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