Solved NVMe drive Question

Winuser · Jul 31, 2023

Flashorn said:
Well, it will happen I guess. They are not infallible. Did you have any
data that was important to you on that drive?

I only used it to run the Mezzmo program to stream the content from the USB HDD to my TVs and other devices. I now have another Mini PC running it so the U59 can wait. I was looking at a 2.5" SSD at Walmart. They only had the 1TB drives. I almost bought it then decided to wait until I have some extra money to spend on it.

Winuser · Jul 31, 2023

Flashorn said:
What about the mini PC? what you going to use in that one?

I'm going to wait until I have more spending money and buy either a M.2 Sata drive or a 2.5" SSD. For now I'm using my Mini PC I bought for my mancave. It's been to hot to go outside to my shed anyway.

Winuser · Jul 31, 2023

I want to thank everyone that responded. I now have a better understanding about M.2 drives. To sum it up. My Mini PC still doesn't work. The NVMe drive is setup and working in the enclosure. I will try again but not until I get paid again from my part time job. Tomorrow is a new month and that means it's bill paying time again.

Flashorn · Jul 31, 2023

Winuser said:
I want to thank everyone that responded. I now have a better understanding about M.2 drives. To sum it up. My Mini PC still doesn't work. The NVMe drive is setup and working in the enclosure. I will try again but not until I get paid again from my part time job. Tomorrow is a new month and that means it's bill paying time again.

Glad to see that your satisfied with "some" of the results.
Wish I could've been more help and faster at decoding all
of this stuff. But, hey, I think we both learned more than
we thought we would. Good thread.

Winuser · Jul 31, 2023

Flashorn said:
Glad to see that your satisfied with "some" of the results.
Wish I could've been more help and faster at decoding all
of this stuff. But, hey, I think we both learned more than
we thought we would. Good thread.

It definitely wqs a learning experience for me.

johnlgalt · Jul 31, 2023

Winuser said:
When the new drive wouldn't show in File Explorer My thoughts were that I had ruined it by trying it in the mini pc. I was wrong and it just needed to be initialized. I gave up on trying to use it in the Mini PC. I was going to try a 2.5" drive but I couldn't find a spare. The new NVMe drive is working so I'm going to use it as a USB drive.

Ahhh, I was mistaken, I thought you said it worked in the mini PC itself.

Winuser said:
I want to thank everyone that responded. I now have a better understanding about M.2 drives. To sum it up. My Mini PC still doesn't work. The NVMe drive is setup and working in the enclosure. I will try again but not until I get paid again from my part time job. Tomorrow is a new month and that means it's bill paying time again.

Yeah, when I built my rig, I spent hours researching all the little tiny things, and this was one of them.

Flashorn said:
Glad to see that your satisfied with "some" of the results.
Wish I could've been more help and faster at decoding all
of this stuff. But, hey, I think we both learned more than
we thought we would. Good thread.

Always a good thing.

Winuser said:
It definitely was a learning experience for me.

And for someone in the future, too.

So, it seems your machine does not have an NVMe slot, but just a regular SATA III slot, hence the reason a SATA III drive was in there. Live and learn.

bobkn · Jul 31, 2023

bobkn said:
I'm surprised to read that there are NVME M.2 drives with M+B notches, but I tried a Bing AI search, and it returned an example.

Maybe I'll see a unicorn in my yard soon.

To reply to myself,

I dusted off an old 256MB Plextor M6e drive (M.2 2280), that I bought in late 2014. It's PCI-E, with M+B notches.

On the other hand, It's not NVME, and it's only PCI-E 2.0 X2.

Times have changed.

bobkn · Jul 31, 2023

What a confusing, chaotic thread.

Winuser: Does the NVME drive fit in the slot in the mini PC or not?

Flashorn · Jul 31, 2023

bobkn said:
What a confusing, chaotic thread.

You should of been here when we first started. I'm going to continue to pick your
and John's brain's if that's ok with both of you but, not right now.

Flashorn · Jul 31, 2023

My Eurocom Scorpius has these bays for HDD/SSDs. (2012 edition)

Storage: 4 storage bays; up to 5.5TB of HDD/SSD space (1st and 2nd HDD/SSD (SATA 6Gb/s),3rd HDD/SSD via ODD Bay; 4th mSATA SSD); RAID 0/1/5/10

I had it configured with two Crucial 500GB SSDs in RAID 0 but, they never got it to work.
Kept getting kicked off the raid and even Crucial tried writing firmware for it but, they
never got it right either. I have to say that I had the first one they built so, beta tester.
Ended up with Intel 520 480 GB and Seagate Momentus 750GB HDD.
Of course , the games back then were not anywhere close in size as they are
today. Sniper Elite 5 is 150 GBs and that's not covering the DLCs.
It is as good now as it was back then.

hdmi · Aug 1, 2023

Flashorn said:
You should always use the Safely Remove option to eject a USB drive/key.

Not really.

With Windows 10 1809, Microsoft drops safe removal of USB drives as the default option

To safely remove or not to safely remove? That is the question... although another one might reasonably be,

betanews.com

Windows default media removal policy

Manage default media removal policy in Windows.

learn.microsoft.com

hdmi · Aug 1, 2023

SIW2 said:
Doubt it. The osletter doesnt have to be C that is a popular misconception. More likely to be part of the model reference. Might indicate it is the third iteration of that device, or maybe it indicates which oem it was supplied to.

For all we know, that letter 'C' could be for 'China'. Or, since SiliconMotion are based in the Shenzhen area it might actually even be for 'Counterfeit'...

hdmi · Aug 1, 2023

johnlgalt said:
Yes, intentional. If the port (slot) had 2 notches, it would only accept a SATA drive, not an NVMe drive. Since the port (slot) only has a single notch, it's conceivable that it is actually an NVMe port (slot).

I used the same terminology as Winuser so I don't confuse him, but yeah, I'm referring to the number of notches in the slot, discounting the number of notches on the drive.

If the port/slot/socket had 2 protrusions (called 'tabs' in the Wikipedia article about M.2), it would be B+M key, in which case only a B+M key SSD would be able to fit inside. B+M key SSDs usually are SATA, but not always. A typical example of a B+M key SSD that uses NVMe is the WD Blue SN500 (picture below). The reason why most M.2 SATA SSDs use B+M key is so they'll be able to fit in an M key socket, as an M key socket should (normally) be able to support both SATA and NVMe PCIe x4. (But AFAIK there can still be exceptions to this so, please don't shoot me if you found a motherboard with M key socket that only supports NVMe, and not SATA.) If the socket has one tab near the right side it is M key. If the socket has one tab near the left side it is B key, which does not support PCIe x4, but does support both SATA and PCIe x2, and, PCIe x2 does not work with any NVMe SSD that I have seen... it needs all four PCIe lanes to work.

image.png.2d4dba2f6f7be6f263e8d128ff065df8.png

SIW2 · Aug 1, 2023

h310 motherboards often have an m.2 slot which supports sata ssd or nvme but only x2 .

hdmi · Aug 1, 2023

SIW2 said:
h310 motherboards often have an m.2 slot which supports sata ssd or nvme but only x2 .

Thanks for pointing that out, but AFAIK these days you'll be hard pressed to find an NVMe SSD that works in such a slot. All of the NVMe SSDs that I have seen need the NVMe slot to be PCIe x4 or no dice.

Flashorn · Aug 1, 2023

hdmi said:
Not really.

{Once}, I lost data on a USB key (almost 2GBs) and that was it for me. I've always used
the Safely Remove protocol.

So, the article in question and you are absolutely right if you want to limit the performance
of the external peripheral you are using.
I do not want to limit mine so, I use the method described in the article that is to, enable write
caching. I have done this for some time and have not lost any data since. Everyone has their own
way of doing things and this is mine. I try to convey my experiences to others and not just here.
I hope you can appreciate this as I do yours and the other helpers that I find can help me learn
more so that I can, in return, help others.

My USB drives in Device Manager:

SIW2 · Aug 1, 2023

hdmi said:
Thanks for pointing that out, but AFAIK these days you'll be hard pressed to find an NVMe SSD that works in such a slot. All of the NVMe SSDs that I have seen need the NVMe slot to be PCIe x4 or no dice.

Pretty sure they all work just not so quickly. Corsair mp510 worked fine when I tried it.

There are also adapters for pcie x1. I got one to see what it is like. Works fine.

x4

x1

The randoms in the bottom two rows hold up very well, it is the top two rows that suffer and still better than sata.

I had gen3 nvmes to test with. A gen 4 running pcie 4.0 x1 would expect the top two rows to be double those figures.

hdmi · Aug 1, 2023

Flashorn said:
{Once}, I lost data on a USB key (almost 2GBs) and that was it for me. I've always used
the Safely Remove protocol.

So, the article in question and you are absolutely right if you want to limit the performance
of the external peripheral you are using.
I do not want to limit mine so, I use the method described in the article that is to, enable write
caching. I have done this for some time and have not lost any data since. Everyone has their own
way of doing things and this is mine. I try to convey my experiences to others and not just here.
I hope you can appreciate this as I do yours and the other helpers that I find can help me learn
more so that I can, in return, help others.

My USB drives in Device Manager:

Of course I agree it makes absolute sense to enable write caching on it if you're copying relatively large amounts of data and/or the USB device is relatively too slow for what exactly it is that you have in mind, especially if you are on a laptop with some charge left in the battery or are using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) because you can still lose data due to an unexpected power outage otherwise. But then, because the hardware can always fail unexpectedly (and prematurely, i.e. long before the device and/or the computer that the device is plugged into can be considered to be too worn out for it to still be trustworthy) you shouldn't use that as a pretext for not making any backup copies, anyway to begin with. After all, there are other types of risks besides the risk of hardware failure (e.g., software error, user error, virus/hacker attack, etc.) so basically, it's more a matter of losing time and effort spent on recovering the lost data, which isn't to say that the consequence of that can't equally be bad. It certainly can be. Either way, the write caching is now disabled by default so, by default, you don't need Safely Remove. Albeit for reasons that should be completely obvious (or almost...), you might still want to wait till the copying is done before you yank it out.

Flashorn · Aug 1, 2023

hdmi said:
f you're copying relatively large amounts of data

The data I lost was some time ago. I had to transfer files to a USB drive and back then, the transfer rates were abysmal.
So, 2GBs of files lost only to discover this when I got home , I was not a happy camper. Yes, those files were all backed up
on servers back at the office but still, I lost a whole days work. From then on, I always used the Safely Remove option and
obviously verified that the files were still there.
As for my home set up, I updated my UPS to a 900 watt Cyberpower Sine wave in 2012 when I bought my Eurocom Scorpius.
Recently, updated to the same sine wave but a 1000 watt.
Gained most of my knowledge from SevenForums and still appreciate all that I learned there. Now, trying to learn more from
here.
Why would MS default to not using caching when peripherals have also grown in stability and reliability. My T7 is rated at
1000MB/s but, in real life it will attain speeds of about 875MB/s which is pretty darn good for an external drive with caching.
The same can be said for the LSA module which, on this notebook is turned off by default I imagine because I didn't touch
it . W11 is touted as a more secure OS.

hdmi said:
you might still want to wait till the copying is done before you yank it out.

OK, that was pretty funny.

Winuser · Aug 1, 2023

Yes it does fit. It's just not recognized.

Solved NVMe drive Question

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