Can a SATA SSD be used as an External Drive?

As luck has it, I may have a spare SATA Sandisk SSD which I will be using as an external drive.

If I bought and enclosure, would it have any comparable speeds to when it was installed within the system? Im guessing it will be connected by USB or firewire.

Can I just simply go to a futureshop and buy a SATA external enclosure?

Im experimenting with this as there is very little heat generated through the drive.

Which brings me to another question. How would this drive be powered up or is it just plug and play through the connection.

 

SSDs are nothing but a bunch of flash/thumb drives put together.

So it's gonna be just like a big ol' thumb drive that connects thru an USB port.

And obviously the USB bandwidth is nowhere near as high as a direct SATA/IDE connection, so your internal drive will be much faster than any external USB/firewire based drives.

Usually external drives have their own powersource.

 

Thank you.. so Im going to believe the bottleneck of external drives is the USB.

EDIT: and that would then mean the SSD serves no enhancing purpose whatsoever in that function than a regular spinning HD except for the lack of heat do you think? The rate of data transfer would be the same.

 

Well no, an SSD drive has definitely more speed than a regular spinning drive. So anyway you put it, it's definitely an advantage to have an SSD vs a spinning drive. But they will never perform as good as an internal drive.

So while an external SSD will perform better than an external regular HD, the fact is that their bandwidth will be limited to that of the USB port.

 

You wouldnt happen to know the bandwidth of the USB would you?

Is it more or less than the transfer speed of the HD? Im wondering this because, if it is less, then there is actually a bottle neck that means it doesnt matter what you have as a storage drive, it is still slowed through the bottleneck.

 

Yes it can. The power to run will probably require the same power to run a mouse(100 mah). When it's running as a an enclosure the access time will probably be .9 ms to 1.2 ms and your minimum transfer rate will probably be about 30 Mb/s and 50 Mb/s max. It'll be slower than having it in it's internal bay but you should be able to run programs off of it. The bandwidth of USB 2.0 is 480 mbs or 60 Mega bytes a second.

 

Thanks Jedi so....does that mean that the ssd will transfer at faster speeds than the HD through an enclosure? OOOps considering most hds are well above that access time, of course it would.

Thanks


Oh and sorry...then I have to ask...if the max of an enclosure would be around 60MB/s, why would a SSD that can push out 70-80read not have a much higher thoroughput?

 

Does your notebook have a esata port? If it does than get something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817348023.

 

No I dont think so..

 

2.5" drives do not require an external power source, as they do not exceed the USB maximum output of 500mA per port and can run off the provided USB cable splitter that comes with the enclosure. 3.5" mechanical drives require much more power, and as such will require a supplementary power source.

Since a SSD drive requires less power than a mechanical disk device, they should not require an additional power source. If the power usage of the device is below 1A, it can be run off USB directly.

 

Thanks...Gonna try and grab one this week.

 

If you have the chance, you might want to get an enclosure with an eSata port. Most also have usb as well, and it's a noticeable speed increase should you have the opportunity to use eSata on a desktop or notebook in the future.

 

The laptop I have does not have esata so i would have to rely on a esata express card would I not in this case???

 

Flamenko, that last sentence needs to be reworded. But yes, you should get an e-SATA expresscard so that you can take advantage of the bandwidth since expresscard can use PCIe x1.