Adata, OWC, and Stardom Roll Out USB4 SSDs and Enclosures for Faster External Storage

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• abufrejoval - Monday, January 8, 2024 - link

  You can blame it on the PDP-11/34 with its dual swappable 10MB 19” (DL-10?) rack sized single platter disk drives, or you can blame it on the dual floppy Apple ][ that I saved for working on the PDP-11, but as a consequence of those juvenile impressions I’ve always yearned for the ease of swappable primary storage and the speed of non-volatile RAM (the PDP-11 had magnetic core memory).
  
  Yeah, it’s nice that swappable storage today has moved ever so slightly beyond SATA speeds, but the loss of flexibility (moving media between internal, external or hot-swap-internal use) vs. SATA hasn’t really paid in significantly better performance: NVMe has moved forward quite a bit, is at 15/12GByte/s now, according to Sabrent, somewhat less on my systems, none of which go beyond PCIe v4 yet.
  
  But it’s certainly no longer 1GByte/s, which is more or less what I’ve been able to get, even on TB, as none of the enclosures I got used more than 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes, an important detail none of them ever mentioned in their specs.
  
  With µ-SDcard media at 2TB and USB4 or TBx based media of the same capacity being easily 100x the volume robbing desk space and occupying valuable ports with cables that are both in the way and far too easy to suffer accidental unplugging or tearing, I wonder if somehow engineering (hello, anyone left?) got the message that consumers would really like storage that can be plugged INTO a chassis in any of the common form factors from ultrabook via NUC to workstation tower while offering speedy primary/bootable but also hot-swap storage that will remain compatible for a decade or two and doesn’t cost a kidney.
  
  I had PDP-type bootable Syquest 5 ¼” swappable hard disks with a different OS on each at 40 or 80MB when hard disks were typically 5 ¼” full height (the space that today easily accommodates 8 2.5” hot-swap SATA media) and I had Limdow MO drives that looked just like a 3.5” floppy after some Christmas fattening but stored nearly 500x as much data: Those were the first MO type you could actually boot without growing a beard, but mostly they promised near eternal durability (turns out storage capacity is the real killer).
  
  By today’s standards they were giant, tower chassis-only, but just like floppies, DVD-drives or µ-SDcards they ‘swallowed’ their media, enclosing and protecting the most precious of your digital possessions, data, with all their physical might, while they’d release it safely (mostly) on your command.
  
  I’m rather sure that this is what many consumers desire and few would mind if it came included anyway. Yet, I see that perpetually staying out of reach, even if the technical assets that would make it possible remain tantalizingly within reach.
  
  One reason is certainly corporate politics, which has always tried to keep a maximum of control over the storage that is supposed to be yours on a Personal Computer. For ages, Windows NT resisted running from media it recognized as potentially portable and Apple’s unspeakable perversion of personal storage tied to a chip they solder is the ugliest outgrowth of that mindset.
  
  A lot may also be technical: running high-bandwidth data has always meant the shortest possible connections and the fewest yet most reliable connectors
  
  But most of it seems to be engineers trying to gain more control over consumers via the devices they sell than creating empowerment for consumers: if they stop to think about it, they’d probably argue that management sets those goal posts. But every now and then technology that truly empowers creates a new market…
  
  µ-SD cards are great, until they fall into one crack or another or you rolled your chair over the one with the truly precious data. But at 2TB per unit today, the only thing I’m missing are enclosures and controllers to RAID them together if capacity and speed are holding them down. To me they present the primarily-portable storage device form factor.
  
  With compact flash (just the size, not the connector or interface) I felt removable media enjoyed an extremely reasonable form factor: small enough to fit even into an ultra-book or tablet device, yet with sufficient room and surface to contain and cool potentially very active components inside. They are also much easier to “manage on a crowded desk” and won’t fall as easily into the smallest cracks (or even between the keys of a proper keyboard). I’d see something like them as the primarily-powerful storage device form factor.
  
  For all I care they could be Flash, or in fact CXL [NV-]RAM, but ‘stackability’ or RAIDability again ensures that they don’t get invalidated by technical progress before their standardization got through the committees.
  
  And for these form factors I would want flexibility in terms of just how removable or exposed these two major media types might be: having them stick out for dock usage could be fine, as could be a spring-loaded or lever based or in fact motorized ejection mechanism. Outside sealing covers for “Toughbooks” or embedded sounds like the ticket, on a notebook I dislike anything that sticks out, because accidents, co-workers and kids to happen.
  
  Today, whenever I plug one of these USB connected storage devices, I find myself far too often flying into fits of frustration, because the stick and the port won’t match form factor (USB-A/USB-C) or won’t fit side-by-side into the same notebook, or the proper adapter or cable just happens to be used elsewhere, just isn’t not around, or in fact turns out to be defective after far too little use.
  
  What tends to calm me these days is that no AI I’ve tried has even remotely suggested such a product could be a “market disruptor”, because the best they can do is mimic average intelligence which is a far cry from human ingenuity… whose underlying driver is often frustration they cannot feel.
  
  So, if there are some warm-blooded engineers left out there: could you please re-invent practical empowering personal computing storage based on usability, please?

• roddaman - Monday, February 19, 2024 - link

  Why is no company making enclosures for high capacity (22TB) 3.5 in. hard disk drives? Are the benefits of such enclosures moot because they cannot really make use of 40 Gbps speeds like SSDs can?