M.2 -> USB adapter?

[Elixer]

I am trying to think of why you would want such a thing?
M.2 is still faster than USB, and much more expensive so... ???

http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=612

 

[Drako]

What's to understand?

If you have an M.2 SATA card sitting around, you can use it in this enclosure for external storage.

 

[ch33zw1z]

My kid has one. We tried to fix a chromebook with a new m2 drive, if that didn't work we have a kingwin (i think that's it) little enclosure. now we have a 64GB USB3.0 M.2 drive for about $40. It was more about fixing the chromebook, and a fallback to use the hardware.

 

[Billy Tallis]

M.2 SSDs don't have to use NVMe, and they don't have to use PCIe. M.2 SATA SSDs are only a little bit more expensive than 2.5" SATA SSDs, and USB 3.1 gen 2 is faster than SATA.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

SATA may still be faster in terms of IOPS but sequentials should be the same seeing as it's a 10Gbps USB-connection.

I actually own an enclosure that looks pretty similar to that one.
Because I like having a large USB-drive that performs pretty well no matter of what data I'm writing/reading to/from it.

 

[DaveSimmons]

It's useful if you have a messed up system with M.2 drive, you need to copy off some data or erase some data, and you don't have other PCs with a spare M.2 slot.

My new office PC from March suddenly became unbootable. Before sending it in for service, I needed to erase things like source code and code signing keys in case they send back a new machine. I've read stories of factory refurbs being send out with customer data on the hard drive and we couldn't allow that to happen.

I didn't find anything like that at the time, so I needed to use a PCI-E slot adapter instead, which was much less convenient.