Originally Posted by
Rubidad Greetings,
My new laptop has a USB 3.1 type C port. I've been thinking of getting a USB 3.0 external enclosure (3.1 ones are costly and hard to find). I would throw in a 500 GB SSD (probably a M.2 2280, again because of expense).
What kind of transfer speeds would I be looking at?
I assume the bottle neck will be the SSD. Am I correct?
If you get an enclosure that takes an M.2 drive, my guess at the bottleneck would be the USB 3.0/enclosure. I say guess because I have no idea what M.2 2280 drive you want to use (as that's just the form factor) *but* there are various drives out there that can theoretically perform more than twice as fast as USB 3.0. Personally, if you're going to go with a USB 3.0 enclosure, you're probably better off getting a SATA enclosure along with a regular 2.5" sata ssd. Anything else will have you spending a large amount and probably not getting more performance. USB 3 can go to a theoretical maximum of 640 MBps. There are M.2s out there that can get ~3.5GB/s read speeds and ~2.1GB/s write speeds (granted, this is the high end). So, I'd stick with a 2.5" SATAIII SSD with a USB3.0 SATAIII enclosure. You can probably get slower M.2s, but honestly, if SATAIII is already close to saturating the USB3.0 throughput, what's the point?