The ASM2464PD is also designed to be compliant with the Thunderbolt 4 specification and ASMedia is targeting the Thunderbolt certification by the end of Q2 2023. Once the certification has been granted, end-product devices utilizing the ASM2464PD would also be eligible for Thunderbolt certification testing." I really like the products produced by Argon40, even if there have been a number of issues along the way. When I saw they had released an expansion board with NVMe support I decided to buy one to test it out. At present, the Argon ONE NVMe expansion board is only available as a standalone board to extend the Argon ONE platform, the M.2 SATA version is available as either an expansion board or bundled with an Argon ONE v2. TLDR Three thermal pads will cover the length of a standard (2280) NVMe SSD, on pad for a 2230 or 2242 NVMe SSD and two pads for a 2260 NVMe SSD.

As you can see from the table above, determining whether you have a 512n (drive with reported and physical sectors of 512 bytes), 512e (the 512 emulation 4096 “Advanced Format” drives with physical 4096B clusters), or 4Kn (drive with both reported and physical sectors of 4096B) is crucial to determine which Windows operating systems will be able to recognize the drive. The SK Hynix Beetle is a drive to be seen with, a great conversation starter. The Beetle is small and light enough to be taken anywhere, and it offers some protection from tumbles. Its speed is comparable to other USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs we have reviewed. It’s priced a little higher per gigabyte than most external SSDs, but since its capacity maxes out at 1TB, you can still have this gem without it busting your budget. I also have a couple Orico drives with fans, but those are just overkill and mostly for show. They do work, just big and require tools to swap drives. Optionally, this output can be saved to a file using the following: `sudo smartctl --all /dev/sd n> ~/smartdata.txt` for detailed examination

What Is the Best External SSD Interface?

I reviewed this expansion board last month in my post: Argon ONE NVMe Board (maybe) Slower than SATA, where I discovered that some boards have shipped running the incorrect firmware leading to poor performance. Due to the Chinese New Year holidays resolving this issue with the Argon Forty team has taken longer than desired.

Power usage is relatively low, temperature is comfortable, boot, UAS and trim all working as it should.

Most current Linux distributions use fstrim.service and fstrim.timer to coordinate periodic SSD maintenance with TRIM. However USB connected SSDs do not automatically have TRIM enabled, instead requiring some manual configuration. The TRIM command can be issued manually using the fstrim command, for example the following code will run Trim on compatible file system mounted to /media/user/USBSTORAGE. Please note, all code examples in this document require root permissions unless otherwise noted. When a file is no longer needed by the file system, the TRIM command can be sent to the SSD to help the built-in garbage collection utility determine which memory locations need to be maintained and which can be ignored. Maintaining unnecessary memory locations takes time and can slow down read and write access to the drive. I have also reviewed the excellent Orico Montage MTQ-40G external SSD, which was the first USB4 SSD to launch, and it has read speeds rated as up to 3,126MB/s. I was able to achieve 3,340MB/s for sequential reads and nearly 2000MB/s for writes. To benefit fully from an NVMe SSD, you must be able to boot the operating system from it. That requires BIOS support. Sigh. Most older mainstream BIOS’s do not support booting from NVMe and most likely, never will. There’s simply no benefit to the vendors to add it, and a very real downside: You’re less likely to upgrade a system that’s been updated with NVMe, unless you play PC games or do something truly CPU-intensive, like editing 2160p (4K)/4320p(8K) video. Samsung