Question Tell me about using USB 3.1 "MLC" adopters!

[Harry_Wild]

I have a older desktop and was looking at getting a USB 3.1 MLC adopter - (housing), an adopter that you just slip in your MLC card inside of the adopter and plug it in you USB 3.0 input! Is there any advantages to this over my SATA for boot up time? I do not think it will be noticable!

 

[Muadib]

I'm not going to guess. When you say MLC card, do you mean a Micro SD card, or an SSD drive?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that he means M.2. Do you mean M.2 SATA, or M.2 NVMe?

 

[Harry_Wild]

I think that he means M.2. Do you mean M.2 SATA, or M.2 NVMe?

M.2 NVMe!

 

[myocardia]

I have a older desktop and was looking at getting a USB 3.1 MLC adopter - (housing), an adopter that you just slip in your MLC card inside of the adopter and plug it in you USB 3.0 input! Is there any advantages to this over my SATA for boot up time? I do not think it will be noticable!

Your SATA SSD is faster than any USB drive could be...because of the interface. Your SATA SSD would also be slower, if forced to use the USB bus. All of my SATA SSD boot drives (in multiple computers, mind you) take 10-12 seconds, if I remove the requirement to type a password for a single boot. If yours is taking much longer, you need to buy RAM, not a different SSD.

 

[Muadib]

Your SATA SSD is faster than any USB drive could be...because of the interface. Your SATA SSD would also be slower, if forced to use the USB bus. All of my SATA SSD boot drives (in multiple computers, mind you) take 10-12 seconds, if I remove the requirement to type a password for a single boot. If yours is taking much longer, you need to buy RAM, not a different SSD.

That's not right. Sata speeds top out at 6Gb/s, where USB 3.1 tops out at 10Gb/s. Using a M2 NVMe drive in an USB 3.1 enclosure would be faster than a sata SSD. I'm not sure if you can boot off them though, but here's the one I have:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-EC-NVME-Aluminum-Enclosure-Nvme/dp/B07K4TZQ7D

It works well. I have my M.2 Nvme drive that came from my laptop in it. It's only a 500mb drive, but it rocks for backing up.

 

[Muadib]

Saw this on the main page: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1509...and-plugable-tbt3nvme2tb-portable-ssds-review

 

[myocardia]

That's not right. Sata speeds top out at 6Gb/s, where USB 3.1 tops out at 10Gb/s. Using a M2 NVMe drive in an USB 3.1 enclosure would be faster than a sata SSD. I'm not sure if you can boot off them though

You don't seem to realize that, unless something has changed very, very recently, both USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 only function once inside of the OS. They do not function without a driver. He will be booting at USB 2.0 speeds for most of the boot process, if not all of it.

 

[Muadib]

You don't seem to realize that, unless something has changed very, very recently, both USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 only function once inside of the OS. They do not function without a driver. He will be booting at USB 2.0 speeds for most of the boot process, if not all of it.

I have no problem booting a 3.0 thumb drive with a windows install on it. Are you saying the speed is limited until the install starts?
I never tried booting an OS with my external M.2 NVMe drive.

 

[Harry_Wild]

??? which is it? Faster or not? Will it be bootable? Hahaha! Some must know!

 

[Muadib]

These are the drives speeds using USB 3.1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 978.364 MB/s [ 933.0 IOPS] < 8562.17 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 683.462 MB/s [ 651.8 IOPS] < 1530.08 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 116.518 MB/s [ 28446.8 IOPS] < 17941.56 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 16.473 MB/s [ 4021.7 IOPS] < 247.17 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 1024.272 MB/s [ 976.8 IOPS] < 8116.53 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 747.305 MB/s [ 712.7 IOPS] < 1397.74 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 126.780 MB/s [ 30952.1 IOPS] < 16456.47 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 37.236 MB/s [ 9090.8 IOPS] < 109.56 us>

Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
Date: 2019/11/14 17:50:46
OS: Windows 10 [10.0 Build 18362] (x64)

 

[Muadib]

??? which is it? Faster or not? Will it be bootable? Hahaha! Some must know!

It's definitely faster than a SATA SSD, but I don't know if it will be bootable. Let me see what Microsoft has on it's site.
It looks like your problem won't be speed, it will be putting Windows on it. The installer won't install windows on a usb drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It looks like your problem won't be speed, it will be putting Windows on it. The installer won't install windows on a usb drive.

This.

 

[Harry_Wild]

I remember that Windows will not be able to boot on USB a while ago but now everything is lightning and USB-C for speed. Microsoft knows this and might have provide for it to work now!

 

[Billy Tallis]

A few months ago I picked up a few M.2 NVMe to USB enclosures from eBay. So far, I've used them mostly to image with OS installers or liveCD images, but I have at least once done a live Windows install onto the USB-attached-NVMe device using WinToUSB (https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/). I don't recall whether that was with the ASMedia or JMicron bridge chip, but I haven't noticed any compatibility issues with either, yet.

 

[mikeymikec]

You don't seem to realize that, unless something has changed very, very recently, both USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 only function once inside of the OS. They do not function without a driver. He will be booting at USB 2.0 speeds for most of the boot process, if not all of it.

Please cite a reliable source for this claim.

I personally don't think this is correct, since I'm installing Win10 regularly from USB and there is a very noticeable difference in how quickly the first progress bar (on the black screen) moves when transferring via USB 2.0 and 3.0.

I put my assertion to the test on my own PC.

USB 2.0: 9.35 seconds
USB 3.0: 4.62 seconds

 

[Harry_Wild]

I will revisit this thread in a weeks time for more info to come in! LOL!

 

[myocardia]

Please cite a reliable source for this claim.

I personally don't think this is correct, since I'm installing Win10 regularly from USB and there is a very noticeable difference in how quickly the first progress bar (on the black screen) moves when transferring via USB 2.0 and 3.0.

I put my assertion to the test on my own PC.

USB 2.0: 9.35 seconds
USB 3.0: 4.62 seconds

What does any of this entire post have to do with Windows boot times? I've not once mentioned installing Windows in this thread. Of course it takes twice as long to copy the data that you downloaded from Microsoft onto an internal hard drives/SSDs which you are installing Windows on. I can't imagine anyone on Earth arguing with you on that, since USB 2.0 is roughly half as fast as USB 3.0. Zero of that has the slightest thing to do with Windows boot times, of course.

 

[mikeymikec]

What does any of this entire post have to do with Windows boot times? I've not once mentioned installing Windows in this thread. Of course it takes twice as long to copy the data that you downloaded from Microsoft onto an internal hard drives/SSDs which you are installing Windows on. I can't imagine anyone on Earth arguing with you on that, since USB 2.0 is roughly half as fast as USB 3.0. Zero of that has the slightest thing to do with Windows boot times, of course.

You said that Windows does not support >USB 2.0 transfer speeds during the boot process. I am arguing that since the Windows setup environment obviously does right from the start, and since the setup environment is a minimal Windows environment in itself, such as it supports the command prompt, task manager, notepad, etc, logically if it supports USB 3.0 transfer speeds, then it's logical to assume that therefore so does the Windows boot process. IMO it would be utterly ridiculous to suggest the Windows setup environment has greater hardware support than Windows itself. If you wanted to make such a claim, as I said, I think it's reasonable to ask for a decent citation.

 

[Topweasel]

I think this under the miss understanding that some chipsets allow the port to work in a USB 2.0 mode when driver support for 3.0 doesn't exist. This was more prevalent when moving from USB to USB 2.0. Most Windows 10 installs have support for 3.0 built in and would for various reason's have the drivers loaded early into the boot process (so that you can actually input something if a boot menu comes up). Nowadays backwards compatibility with 3.0 ports doesn't really exist and the drivers have to be loaded for devices plugged into USB 3.0 ports to work. Meaning it would have to be loaded in the boot environment to boot from a device plugged into a 3.0 slot.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think this under the miss understanding that some chipsets allow the port to work in a USB 2.0 mode when driver support for 3.0 doesn't exist. This was more prevalent when moving from USB to USB 2.0. Most Windows 10 installs have support for 3.0 built in and would for various reason's have the drivers loaded early into the boot process (so that you can actually input something if a boot menu comes up). Nowadays backwards compatibility with 3.0 ports doesn't really exist and the drivers have to be loaded for devices plugged into USB 3.0 ports to work. Meaning it would have to be loaded in the boot environment to boot from a device plugged into a 3.0 slot.

Yeah, that was in the back of my mind as well (I think I've seen transitional USB 2/3 support too), but I didn't know enough about how the fallback worked so I didn't want to mention it. Without that transitional fallback feature you mentioned, Win7 for example would flat-out not see those USB ports until it had been installed along with a USB 3.0 driver. It was a PITA because a minimal laptop without a CD drive then couldn't have Windows 7 installed via a USB CD drive.

 

[Harry_Wild]

I decided to stay with my SATA3 interface and face the 3-4 seconds more of loading Windows 10. In two more years, going with Intel 10th generation CPU after costs go down.