# I was wrong....



## José Herring (Oct 5, 2020)

So, by accident I ended up picking up 2 used SSD Samsung QVO 860. I really need to pay attention more the fine print on Amazon.com

But, I decided to stress test them and they seem to work fine. I was getting usual Sata III speeds from them so for streaming they are going to work out fine. 

Then I decided that I'm tired of opening the box every time I get new drives so I wanted to use these guys as external drives. I got OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini external housing for USB 3.1 gen 2 ports. And holy Smokes Batman!! I tested that sucker and I'm get read/write speeds comparable to my internal NVMe's. If only I had known! I didn't know that was possible but apparently the bottleneck on SSD's is really the Sata III port. Once unleashed from that those little QVO drives fly.

At some point I'll probably replace them with 2 2tb Evo's or 2 4tb Evo's when prices come down but man I'm happy so far. Streaming the most demanding libraries on External drives is rather cool.


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## gsilbers (Oct 5, 2020)

im confused. i thought the evo ssd drives have the sata3 because they have that sata output so no matter if they are internal or on external enclosure the speed out of the ssd drives would still be sata3 speeds. Or does that onclosure bypass something? or open the ssd drives?


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## José Herring (Oct 5, 2020)

gsilbers said:


> im confused. i thought the evo ssd drives have the sata3 because they have that sata output so no matter if they are internal or on external enclosure the speed out of the ssd drives would still be sata3 speeds. Or does that onclosure bypass something? or open the ssd drives?


The connector is one thing but the SATA bus is another thing and that is the bottleneck. Using usb 3.1 gen 2 doesn't use the SATA port on your mobo. Usb 3.1 gen 2 is about 4gb/s fastet than SATS 6g.

I was hoping that somebody that actually knows something about this could chime in  i'm just as baffled as you are.


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## d.healey (Oct 5, 2020)

NVME (PCIe) is 3500MB/s, USB3.1 Gen 2 is only 1250. So it's faster than SATA 3 but not even half way to PCIe speeds. However real world speeds are always different to theoretical benchmarks.


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## José Herring (Oct 5, 2020)

Hmmmmm.....I am getting around 2500 for both. Will test again tonigjht.


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## khollister (Oct 6, 2020)

While there may be something dodgy with your MB SATA ports, it is impossible to get more than the 6 Gbs SATA 3 off of a SATA 3 drive. 

Assuming you are testing the correct drive, I suspect however you are testing may not be bypassing the RAM caching of the OS, hence the same speeds for NVMe and external SATA.


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## José Herring (Oct 6, 2020)

khollister said:


> While there may be something dodgy with your MB SATA ports, it is impossible to get more than the 6 Gbs SATA 3 off of a SATA 3 drive.
> 
> Assuming you are testing the correct drive, I suspect however you are testing may not be bypassing the RAM caching of the OS, hence the same speeds for NVMe and external SATA.


You are correct. I think it was user error because when I retested it was back down to 560mb/sec. 

So my bad, and I'm trying to change the name of the thread.


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## Michael Antrum (Oct 6, 2020)

Don’t worry about it. I’m wrong all the time. Seriously.

Just ask my wife, she’ll tell you.....


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## Hendrixon (Oct 9, 2020)

Jose you are everywhere  

If the test you did used small files, you probably tested the cache of the external enclosure.
The drives them selves have on them controllers, and those controllers communicate with the i/o bus controller of the motherboard.
Your enclosure has a SATAIII i/o bus controller in it to interface the drives, which means the speed between them will always adhere to SATAIII protocol.


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## José Herring (Oct 9, 2020)

Hendrixon said:


> Jose you are everywhere
> 
> If the test you did used small files, you probably tested the cache of the external enclosure.
> The drives them selves have on them controllers, and those controllers communicate with the i/o bus controller of the motherboard.
> Your enclosure has a SATAIII i/o bus controller in it to interface the drives, which means the speed between them will always adhere to SATAIII protocol.


Yes, major upgrades happening to my setup but it's slowing down now. 

Makes sense. I had it in the wrong USB 3 port at first. Then when I switched it I got blazing speeds once.


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