Question *STABLE* NVMe - USB Adapter?

[cyberjedi]

I'm looking to buy a *RELIABLE* NVME-USB external adapter, that doesn't disconnect randomly, can keep up the close to 1GB/s speed.
So far all adapter's reviews contain frighteningly high % of reports of malfunction, random disconnects, sub-par speeds, falling to even under USB 2.0 speeds, etc.
There are 3 main chipsets in the market: JMicron JMS583, Asmedia ASM2362, and Realtek RTL9210 (no product has surfaced with the latter yet, so no REAL reviews, experiences yet UPDATE: it is on the market already).
Also ASUS has a new product, ROG Strix Arion, but there isn't enough feedback about it yet, and I mean real life feedback not just being able to run a few benchmarks, but real stress test to see if the device (adapter) can keep it up, without disconnecting or slowing down hard.
I would really appreciate any feedback from those who have GOOD experiences during stress-tests, like tons of random 4k writes with a stable speed, cloning 100's of GB-s at a stable high speed close to 1GB/s.
I know SSD's very well, so please stick to the point and don't start to educate me on how their speed falls after some writes, etc. I'm aware and this is NOT the point.
You can help if you can point me to a STABLE and RELIABLE NVMe-USB-C adapter that WORKS as expected.
Thank you in advance!

 

[kai84]

Why it's so difficult to share a link to a hoster that does not expire. LINK 2.0.9 JMS583 for NewMaxx and all others.

Thank you, it saved my day. My Sabrent NVME USB-C enclosure based on JMS583 wouldn't work on my MAG X570 Tomahwk but after flashing the 2.0.9 Firmware via my Notebook it is now working perfectly.

Flashing worked like a charm and is literally a piece of cake.

 

[nosurprises]

For SATA for usb 3.1 gen 1 (5gb/s) also called usb 3.0 I recommend jms580

For nvme usb 3.1 gen 2 10gb/s I recommend rtl9210, rather than jms583 which uses higher amperage and has higher temperature.

Technically, they're USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 now And there is 2x2 or 4x4 or whatever.

 

[apoelistasaudi]

Marketing. ... Only. No difference.
Technically this is the spec of each irrespective of newer or older names. I don't give emphasis on newer names because it is marketing.
5gbps
10gbps
20gbps

 

[flowerdealer]

Hi everyone. I have an older WD black nvme ssd that I was trying to use with an Orico max-m2vp enclosure, on an x470 asrock motherboard. Out of the box, the enclosure didn't work at all on my 3.1 gen 2 usb A port, and max speed was around 37mb on the usb-c 3.1 gen 2 port. The usb 3.0 speeds were around 400mbps. I read this thread and updated the firmware to 1.23.15. However, my usb-c speeds are still extremely slow (around 100mbps), the usb-a 3.1 port now works but is super slow, and the usb 3.0 speed was halfed to around 200mbps. Any ideas on how to improve this? What enclosure do you think would work better with an x470 board? Thanks everyone.

 

[Super Spartan]

So which is the best one so far?

 

[apoelistasaudi]

@Super Spartan Rtl9210 or jms583?? Could not find this info. Reviews not so helpful. No tech information is rubbish info. My opinion or my 2 cents if you live in the States .

 

[BlackCT]

@like2watch
Firmware v1.23.9 for RTL9210 / RTL9210B chipsets re-uploaded here.

Use it at your own risk!!

Just added the pulled configuration file of the firmware of the device that I just received which is experiencing random disconnections and causing problematic USB C port access issues on my MacBook Pro 2016 with Touch Bar installed with the most recent MacOS release 11.2 Big Sur.
I was using the device with Time Machine but it is randomly disconnecting which is causing the backup to stop.
This galls the whole backup process.
I bought this device from:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001297316228.html
Right now I am not impressed with it although it looks ok but as said previously by other users that it does not work as expected.
And I do not know how to open a dispute case on AliExpress once I confirmed received goods.
I have also reported the problem to Apple as feedback to their public beta program but I have not received a reply.
I am also not taking to risk to flash the firmware as I think this is the only known version which is the most recent on this board.
And there aren't any tools to easily fetch the firmware from the board to share on the forum through the USB port.


I have used Kingston 1TB NVMe SSD in this enclosure if that is relevant to the 'random disconnect' discussion here.

SSD KC2000 - Kingston Technology

www.kingston.com

Tool output.

The controller chip and the chip next to it photos uploaded.

Updates:
Just trimmed the thermal spreader and will see what happens next.
Just over 27 minutes the device has just disconnected itself.
Will see what happens without heatsink attached.
44 minutes without the heatsink, so far so good.
Disconnected again while (may be it gets disconnected right after the backup / does not matter now because it disconnects unexpectedly) backing up with Time Machine without the heatsink but with the thermal pad on the controller this is 74 minutes since connecting it to the USBC port.
There's a 10 minutes timer in which the device will shut itself down into standby mode without the abrupt disconnection.
Since reconnection and removal of the thermal pad from the controller 47 minutes have passed and now it does it again abruptly disconnects itself.
Really strange is that now I have the thermal pad cut then I found there are some parts of the thermal pad leftover which can be stacked on top of the controller and figured that if I stack it up could improve the efficiency of cooling it down.
So, since the stack up and the USB connection its been 1 hours 07 minutes without abrupt disconnection which is more than pleasure to observe!
Another wild guess is that there are or is weak soldering points on the header of the connector which may be the cause of the abrupt disconnection since now I have placed twice the thickness under the controller and 1 hour 28 minutes have passed without abrupt disconnection. I am making this guess because I found that there are some issues with the cable and the connector where on multiple occasions it will not be detected by the MacBook Pro which is rather odd. And when I flipped the cable and reconnect it gets detected just fine. So, there may be some quality assurance issues with this company's enclosure which have just wasted my time for couple of days now.
Still connected after 2 hours.
Seriously lame, I left the computer put it in display standby mode and came back just to find out it is disconnected again 11 minutes ago and the stopwatch reads 2 hours 21 minutes and 44 seconds.
What a complete useless enclosure at this state.
I don't know what else to say but it's been really strange experience with this, I reformatted it so that it is now clean without any backups, disconnected the power, external display, lid closed and network interfaces down that has been like almost 6 hours in MBP in sleep mode and there has not been a disconnection notification.

* Solved: Erased the device on MacOS 11.3 Beta, its APFS does not cause the disconnection problem on the 11.2 release.
Added: Interesting benchmarks.

 

[Jed1992]

Hi everyone,

Super informative thread. Thanks.

I am also super interested in stability (to the extent that I am willing to sacrifice some speed) as nothing is worse than a disconnection in an important task.

In this regard, would you say thunderbolt 3 is generally more stable than USB 3.X - both theoretically and in practice?

Cheers

 

[ryanpaul1]

Hi Guys, would like to ask you opinion regarding my Sabrent EC-NVME that uses a JMS583 chip. My problem is when I plugged it in, the drive lights up but it is not showing up in windows. Then when I left it connected hoping that windows picks it up, the drive runs hot after a couple of minutes. I tried ejecting it but it wouldn't so I just shutdown my computer.

I tried updating to version 0209 but still the problem exists. I also tried to place the NVME drive on another enclosure and it shows up on windows.

Thanks!

 

[Super Spartan]

@Super Spartan Rtl9210 or jms583?? Could not find this info. Reviews not so helpful. No tech information is rubbish info. My opinion or my 2 cents if you live in the States .

Just ordered this, will let you know how it performs once I get it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZKB4SLK/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Mr_Resetti80]

Hi Guys, would like to ask you opinion regarding my Sabrent EC-NVME that uses a JMS583 chip. My problem is when I plugged it in, the drive lights up but it is not showing up in windows. Then when I left it connected hoping that windows picks it up, the drive runs hot after a couple of minutes. I tried ejecting it but it wouldn't so I just shutdown my computer.

I tried updating to version 0209 but still the problem exists. I also tried to place the NVME drive on another enclosure and it shows up on windows.

Thanks!

Troubleshooting these things is never easy. It could be a defective enclosure or maybe there is an incompatibility between the drive and the enclosure.
But first thing first:
- What model is the NVME SSD?
- When you say "it shows up in Windows" do you mean in the file explorer? Or in the proper Disk Management (right click on Start Button -> Disk Management)? It could be detected but not properly initialized (sometimes the disk management ask you if you want to initialize the drive as MBR or GPT), thus not shown in file explorer. Which leads to the next question.
- The other enclosure you tried (brand/model?), was it on the same PC/OS? If it was a different PC or OS, that would invalidate your test.
- Have you tried, if possibile, a cross check with the Sabrent enclosure, ie putting another NVME drive, totally different than the one you have problems with, and see if it behaves the same?

 

[albertr]

Hello everybody,

I have two RTL9210-based bridges, one reports Rev as 20.01 and the other - Rev 30.00. Does anyone know which RTL9210 Firmware releases these correspond to?
Are there any way to read the F/W release directly off the bridge when it's plugged to the USB port?
Thanks a bunch!
-albertr

 

[razel]

@like2watch
Firmware v1.23.9 for RTL9210 / RTL9210B chipsets re-uploaded here.

Use it at your own risk!!

Just tried this on my Orico PFM2-C3. Out of the box it came without support for TRIM. Thanks to this thread close to 1 year ago, I updated it to these non-official firmwares. Now TRIM works. No difference noticed with performance.

It was on firmware 1.20.12. Now it's on 1.23.9. So far, I am getting a slight boost in write latency (.100ms to .070ms) according to AS-SSD. It could just be the SSD itself though. Regardless, no negatives noticed so far.

As prior, I am done buying 1st gen chipsets. The newer 2nd gen (ones that support 20Gbps) are out and are in the cheap $30 price range from Orico and Sabrent.

That still remains my recommendation for those looking for NVME-USB enclosures. Get 2nd gen chipsets, the ones that support 20Gbps.

Corrected write latency ms #

 

[nosurprises]

Hello everybody,

I have two RTL9210-based bridges, one reports Rev as 20.01 and the other - Rev 30.00. Does anyone know which RTL9210 Firmware releases these correspond to?
Are there any way to read the F/W release directly off the bridge when it's plugged to the USB port?
Thanks a bunch!
-albertr

When you run the firmware flash program, it will read read the existing firmware version on the chip. It can also dump the existing firmware settings, but I don't think you can dump the existing firmware.

 

[andyhi]

Heya guys, pardon my french if I am posting in wrong thread but..

Yesterday I bought Unitek S1204B with realtek 9210B (RTL9210B chip). Right after I opened a box/inserted nvme ssd I updated version of chip to:

Realtek RTL9210 NVMe/USB 3.1 Controller firmware Version 1.23.15

Before and after update situation did not change. When I connect enclosure to any laptop it doesn't discover any SSD (tried with fresh formatted/partitioned 970 Evo Plus and Toshiba XG5).

Any try of doing something in disk manager in Windows ends in the same way - Incorrect funcion.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

I have an Orico with the 9210b that supports both m.2 NVME and SATA.

I flashed the v1.23.15 bin posted a few pages back. The zip file has two flash images... UTNVME_A_vXXX.bin and UTNVME_B_vXXX.bin.

I assume the one with "B" in the name is for the 9210b. I don't recall having to choose one over the other... if I got the option, I would have chosen the B version.

I just reconfirmed both NVME and SATA drives work in the enclosure with the v1.23.15 firmware.

 

[andyhi]

It was on firmware 1.20.12. Now it's on 1.23.9. So far, I am getting a slight boost in write latency (.100ms to .70ms) according to AS-SSD. It could just be the SSD itself though. Regardless, no negatives noticed so far.

Could be the firmware. Could be OS security updates / CPU microcode mitigations for the spectre/meltdown series of side channel attacks that keep coming. Also could be your SSD if it's been used a lot and the cells are aging.

In other news... There is some interesting work happening with Steve Gibson and his legacy SpinRite program. People have been successfully using his legacy HDD "maintenance" tool at level 3 to recover and refresh SATA connected SSDs.... albeit at a slow interface speed.

Steve has a new freeware "readspeed" HDD/SSD benchmark tool out that he's using for the basis of an updated version of spinrite that will make it feasible for use on large HDDs and for recovering from SSD cell charge level loss.

During development of readspeed, lots of folks reported aging SSDs had drastically slower read times until data is simply rewritten to the same sectors.... somewhat proving cells that have leaked down take much longer for the flash controller to read, pass consistancy checks, etc... similar to how aging HDDs work. I've seen this myself after running his tools on a stack of spare SSDs I've recovered from old hardware over the years.

Spinrite 6.1+ is being updated for the high speed SSD and large HDD age.... no support for NVMe or USB attached drive controllers at this time but USB is on his roadmap.

 

[Super Spartan]

@Super Spartan Rtl9210 or jms583?? Could not find this info. Reviews not so helpful. No tech information is rubbish info. My opinion or my 2 cents if you live in the States .

ASUS ROG STRIX Arion M.2 NVMe SSD External Portable Enclosure Case Review

 

[albertr]

So, after some experimenting:

F/W 1.20.12 reports Rev 30.00
Both F/W 1.23.9 and 1.23.15 report Rev 20.01

-albertr

 

[peterscm]

Hi,

Recently I bought ACASIS M13 case with Rtl9210B chipset. Tested with NVME (ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB) and B&M Key (128GB Foresee) SSD. Both are working fine.

https://www.lazada.com.my//products/i1464698354-s4786494815.html?spm=a2o4k.cart.0.0.427d49fbJUb3kk&urlFlag=true

I am using CrystalDiskMark to test it (multiple round), temperature raise up to max of 42C. Idle temp is around 33.7C. No disconnecting issue (touchwood).



Below is the dump info:

**************************************************************
Device : ACASIS M13 #0
**************************************************************
U2PHY : 02 f4 9b e0 e1
U3PHY : 02 d4 09 00 d5 00 80
VID : 0x0bda
PID : 0x9210
MANUFACTURE : "Realtek"
PRODUCT : "RTL9210B-CG"
SERIAL : "012345678963"
SCSI_PRODUCT : "M13"
SCSI_VENDOR : "ACASIS"
CFEXPRESS : 0x00
LED : 0x02
PINMUX1 : 0x00000000
PINMUX2 : 0x00000070
U2_MAXPWR : 0xfa
U3_MAXPWR : 0x70
ASPMDIS : 0x00
PCIE_REFCLK : n/a
PCIE_PWRCUT_THRES : 0x0a
SWR_1_2V : n/a
EN_UPS : n/a
PD : n/a
CUSTOMIZED_LED : n/a
SUSPEND_LED_OFF : n/a
FORCE_USB_SPEED : n/a
FORCE_PCIE_SPEED : n/a
FORCE_USB_QUIRK : n/a
FORCE_PCIE_QUIRK : n/a
FAN : n/a
DIS_SHOW_EMPTY_DISK : 0x01
FORCE_SATA_NORMAL_DMA : n/a
UART_DBG_PIN : 0x05
FINGER_PRINT_EN : n/a
EFUSE :
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F
-------------------------------------------------
0 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
10 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
30 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
40 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
50 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
60 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
70 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
80 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
90 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
a0 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
b0 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff

Boot Mode : Flash NM
FW Ver : 1.21.23
FW Build Date : 2020.05.05
IC Ver : 0xa0010002
IC Pkg Type : PCIE_SATA
UUID : ffffffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffffffffffff

Disconn_ForceUSB2 : 0x00

 

[apoelistasaudi]

Who said there is a disconnection issue with rtl9210??

We said there is a problem when safely removing hardware. It does not disconnect since led light is still on and after testing it still receives power irrespective of message you get from pc.

 

[IlllI]

So I got my usb enclosure with the JMS580 chip, and started up the fwupdatetool, and it is showing firmware as: 00.02.00.05...
In the .pdf included with the firmware update tool, there is a picture which shows firmware as: 00.02.00.04 as an example.
so...does this mean I have the most updated firmware already installed?

 

[apoelistasaudi]

As far as I know latest for jms580 is 1.0.5.

Note for jms583 it is 2.0.9.

 

[IlllI]

Find 2.0.9

I guess this is in reply to my question above? Maybe I was mistaken but I thought the most recent firmware was 1.0.5 for JMS580?
I actually thought maybe I had been given a JMS583 instead, but I took the thing apart and looked at the chip and it says JMS580... so maybe it's a user error on my end, but I'm not sure why it is showing firmware as 00.02.00.05

edit: I went ahead and proceeded with the flash process, it now shows up as firmware 00.01.00.05
I made a backup of the 00.02.00.05 firmware if anyone is curious

 

[pwaters]

Hi,

I just got an enclosure

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DFMTTZM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

paired with

Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280


I can only use with USB Type A 3.1 (3.2 Gen 2). No USB C to test as motherboard is around 4 years old.

I discovered this forum after testing the speed and finding it..well crap and looking for answers.




There is a lot to take in on this thread but started to get a better idea. Well at least to reveal a few more details.

I updated the firmware for the adapter RTL9210B which is now running the latest firmware. Still had same issue. I installed a config tool as seen in a lot of images.



So can see the reason why the speed is what it is, just not sure why it's reverted to USB 2.0 connected to a 10Gbps port.




I was wondering if there is any way to change this or stuck with limitations of this particular setup/combo? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[apoelistasaudi]

I guess this is in reply to my question above? Maybe I was mistaken but I thought the most recent firmware was 1.0.5 for JMS580?
I actually thought maybe I had been given a JMS583 instead, but I took the thing apart and looked at the chip and it says JMS580... so maybe it's a user error on my end, but I'm not sure why it is showing firmware as 00.02.00.05

edit: I went ahead and proceeded with the flash process, it now shows up as firmware 00.01.00.05
I made a backup of the 00.02.00.05 firmware if anyone is curious

Not sure if it was 1.0.5 or 2.0.5. actually for jms580 I made a backup and uploaded firmware in a thread above. GF
If I remember well it was 1.0.5.

2.0.5 was offered for JMS583.