USB 4.0 devices

[Calson]

I wanted to increase the upload speed from my CFexpress card reader to the computer and so when USB 4.0 was announced I went in search of available hardware. MSI is selling a PCIe card with USM 4.0 on their website's e-store and BH Photo is selling the Prograde USB 4.0 single slot card reader.

https://www.msi.com/PC-Component/ThunderboltM4-8K/Specification

 

[PhotoLover]

I wanted to increase the upload speed from my CFexpress card reader to the computer and so when USB 4.0 was announced I went in search of available hardware. MSI is selling a PCIe card with USM 4.0 on their website's e-store and BH Photo is selling the Prograde USB 4.0 single slot card reader.

https://www.msi.com/PC-Component/ThunderboltM4-8K/Specification

Were you gated by the card read speed or the write speed to the storage?

I should look and see what my current import speed from a CFexpress card to internal SSD is ... I'm getting a OWC Express 1M2 and putting a 4 TB SSD in it, and hoping that my imports are even faster. They are fairly quick now to internal drive or slow SSD (which is being replaced by the OWC solution).

 

[Calson]

The problem appears to be with the Prograde CFexpress card reader which provides lower read performance to a USB 3.0 port that is using a PCIe adapter on the motherboard bus and sending data to internal M.2 SSD drive that is also connected directly to the motherboard. The Microsoft Windows 11 driver may also be part of the problem or the OS itself with all its overhead but I have no way to upgrade that aspect unless I replace the Windows computer with one from Apple and the Apple hardware has its own issues.

I have a dual M.2 card that mirrors the two SSD and I have had two failures in the first 18 months of use. I suspect that the M.2 drives run too hot even with the excellent heat sink in place with the SoNNeT M.2 4x4 PCIe card. This card provides separate data channels for each of the M.2 SSDs and so doubles the effective throughput.

Computer designs have not kept pace with the need to move and process large amount of image files and video. The best available are the gaming computers but they lack PCIe slots for adding cards to provide 10GB Ethernet or multiple M.2 drives and other functions. The designs overall are fairly crude and rely on sticking a faster CPU on the motherboard or using the Nvidia 4090 GPU with a higher output power supply but that is all. The Apple Studio computers leave a lot to be desired in actual use for graphics processing and I do not care to spend $9,000 on a Mac Pro workstation.

 

[BarkingBeans Coffee]

Computer designs have not kept pace with the need to move and process large amount of image files and video. The best available are the gaming computers but they lack PCIe slots for adding cards to provide 10GB Ethernet or multiple M.2 drives and other functions. .

Couldn't agree more - Hubs, backup options, etc.
Curious how much use your M.2's got. Maybe they just don't have durability for the long term. Have you seen others with similar failure rates.

 

[PhotoLover]

Couldn't agree more - Hubs, backup options, etc.
Curious how much use your M.2's got. Maybe they just don't have durability for the long term. Have you seen others with similar failure rates.

The problem appears to be with the Prograde CFexpress card reader which provides lower read performance to a USB 3.0 port that is using a PCIe adapter on the motherboard bus and sending data to internal M.2 SSD drive that is also connected directly to the motherboard. The Microsoft Windows 11 driver may also be part of the problem or the OS itself with all its overhead but I have no way to upgrade that aspect unless I replace the Windows computer with one from Apple and the Apple hardware has its own issues.

I have a dual M.2 card that mirrors the two SSD and I have had two failures in the first 18 months of use. I suspect that the M.2 drives run too hot even with the excellent heat sink in place with the SoNNeT M.2 4x4 PCIe card. This card provides separate data channels for each of the M.2 SSDs and so doubles the effective throughput.

Computer designs have not kept pace with the need to move and process large amount of image files and video. The best available are the gaming computers but they lack PCIe slots for adding cards to provide 10GB Ethernet or multiple M.2 drives and other functions. The designs overall are fairly crude and rely on sticking a faster CPU on the motherboard or using the Nvidia 4090 GPU with a higher output power supply but that is all. The Apple Studio computers leave a lot to be desired in actual use for graphics processing and I do not care to spend $9,000 on a Mac Pro workstation.

I'm also surprised at the high rate of M.2 failures.

I haven't looked at one in a while, you'd probably have to get a server class machine to get the I/O bandwidth you desire (I wonder how much hardware designed to run Windows server doing a lot of I/O costs now, for machine room environments ...). If your use case for I/O is sufficiently higher than the majority of users, desktop makers are not going to build for that.

I don't do video processing, so I can't speak to that. The Mac Studio is decent (even with an M1 chip) for photo processing. And it has enough high speed ports (4 USB 4) for most needs. But you certainly cannot add any cards to it!

 

[wotan1]

I guess I am fortunate in that my interests are with still photography. I shoot almost no video and even less video editing. Maybe I will change my approach one of these days but I am challenged enough with still photography to keep me busy for a long time to come.

For still photo processing use I have not had concerns about data upload speed to the computer with PC and even less concern using an entry level Mac Studio M2.

I guess if I run out of GAS with still photography I can look forward to becoming a video editor and spending $9k on a top of the line Studio Mac Pro. I am having enough trouble getting permission for one of the super primes from She Who Must Be Obeyed.

One must set realistic limits.

 

[Calson]

I suspect the problem with the M.2 SSD is from heat buildup on the card. My mirrored pair rely on passive cooling and the board does use thermal compound and a cooling fin piece that is in contact with the NVME cards but it is not enough.

The expectation is that a sold state drive is going to be more reliable and have a longer life than a hard drive but that is not the reality. Still important to have a setup so that no valuable data is lost when a storage device fails.

For video editing the Wintel computers provide the best value by a wide margin. For $3,000 I can buy a top tier (Lenovo, HP) tower workstation with a i9 CPU and a RTX 4090.

 

[Calson]

The bottom line is that a Windows computer purchased today is going to provide much less performance than one bought near the end of the year. I saw that when the 286 chip replaced the 8086 chip in computers and again with the X286 CPU. One could not simply replace the CPU but needed to buy a new motherboard and new RAM modules. Same with data I/O with USB versions from USB 1.x to now 4.0 and Ethernet going from 1GB to 10GB.

 

[John Navitsky]

I wanted to increase the upload speed from my CFexpress card reader to the computer and so when USB 4.0 was announced I went in search of available hardware. MSI is selling a PCIe card with USM 4.0 on their website's e-store and BH Photo is selling the Prograde USB 4.0 single slot card reader.

https://www.msi.com/PC-Component/ThunderboltM4-8K/Specification

note i think that's thunderbolt 4, not usb 4

i'm very keen on usb4 devices because they allow us to get devices that work reasonably on a wide variety of systems (10Gb/s USB) and fast devices (TB3/USB4 capable).

i just picked up a couple of these:

OWC Express 1M2

Ultra-fast, compatible, and reliable portable USB4 NVMe SSD with speeds up to 3151MB/s. Build your own or choose ready-to-run solutions for your Mac or PC.

eshop.macsales.com

and these guys are basically usb4, but before usb4 was a thing:

OWC Envoy Pro FX - The Fastest, Most Compatible Drive Ever Made

Works with yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s Thunderbolt and USB computers and devices, and supports the max performance of any interface up to 2800MB/s.

eshop.macsales.com

but the number of usb4 capable SYSTEMS are very small. for example, this is what newegg lists for usb4 capable motherboards:

1 x USB4,2 x USB4 AMD Motherboards | Newegg.com

Shop 1 x USB4,2 x USB4 AMD Motherboards on Newegg.com. Watch for amazing deals and get great pricing.

www.newegg.com

also, i'm pretty sure that any usb4 adapter card is (currently) going to require a TB header which means they only are going to work for a small number of systems

 

[John Navitsky]

and BH Photo is selling the Prograde USB 4.0 single slot card reader.

i was unaware of this reader and it looks very interesting. tbh, i didn't like their previous reader and this looks like the same reader with new guts, but having a real usb4 reader would be a very good thing.

basically, i'd love to see usb4 "normalized"

 

[John Navitsky]

The problem appears to be with the Prograde CFexpress card reader which provides lower read performance to a USB 3.0 port that is using a PCIe adapter on the motherboard bus and sending data to internal M.2 SSD drive that is also connected directly to the motherboard. The Microsoft Windows 11 driver may also be part of the problem or the OS itself with all its overhead but I have no way to upgrade that aspect unless I replace the Windows computer with one from Apple and the Apple hardware has its own issues.

performance issues reading cfe-b cards are largely due to what type of USB is on your system (or anything in between the reader and the usb port, like the cable, hub, etc). if you can get the reader on a 10Mb/s usb port (which largely should be pretty feasible), you should be able to get about 1000MB/s, which should be "fine" for most purposes. note that the very fastest of fast cfe-b cards can only do about 1600MB/s

 

[John Navitsky]

I have a dual M.2 card that mirrors the two SSD and I have had two failures in the first 18 months of use. I suspect that the M.2 drives run too hot even with the excellent heat sink in place with the SoNNeT M.2 4x4 PCIe card. This card provides separate data channels for each of the M.2 SSDs and so doubles the effective throughput.

afaik, this is unusual. i've used a lot of nvme cards, and haven't had any failures. if you have decent heat sinks on them and you know they are running hot (assuming you're looking at stats using a utility) then you might have a problem with the installation of the heat sink.

 

[John Navitsky]

Oh hey, there's another one:

OWC Atlas CFexpress Card Reader

Ultra-fast compact USB4 (40Gb/s) CFexpress 4.0 Type B card reader for creative professionals with transfer speeds up to 5000MB/s.

eshop.macsales.com

 

[BarkingBeans Coffee]

note i think that's thunderbolt 4, not usb 4

i'm very keen on usb4 devices because they allow us to get devices that work reasonably on a wide variety of systems (10Gb/s USB) and fast devices (TB3/USB4 capable).

i just picked up a couple of these:

OWC Express 1M2

Ultra-fast, compatible, and reliable portable USB4 NVMe SSD with speeds up to 3151MB/s. Build your own or choose ready-to-run solutions for your Mac or PC.

eshop.macsales.com

and these guys are basically usb4, but before usb4 was a thing:

OWC Envoy Pro FX - The Fastest, Most Compatible Drive Ever Made

Works with yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s Thunderbolt and USB computers and devices, and supports the max performance of any interface up to 2800MB/s.

eshop.macsales.com

but the number of usb4 capable SYSTEMS are very small. for example, this is what newegg lists for usb4 capable motherboards:

1 x USB4,2 x USB4 AMD Motherboards | Newegg.com

Shop 1 x USB4,2 x USB4 AMD Motherboards on Newegg.com. Watch for amazing deals and get great pricing.

www.newegg.com

also, i'm pretty sure that any usb4 adapter card is (currently) going to require a TB header which means they only are going to work for a small number of systems

Let us know how you like these when you get them and what NVMe you put in them. I am getting 2900-3000 with my Hyper enclosure on an M1 Mac.

 

[John Navitsky]

Let us know how you like these when you get them and what NVMe you put in them. I am getting 2900-3000 with my Hyper enclosure on an M1 Mac.

i have in hand. i dropped in a random samsung 1tb and gave it a trial run on usb and tb and it seems good. i’m contemplating getting a 8tb card for them longer term

wrt brand, i basically stick to samsung. that said they don’t have an 8tb option so i’m considering sabrent and owc

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[BarkingBeans Coffee]

John, I know you know quite a bit about all this so some questions. All the NVMe see expensive these days. The Crucial 4TB I bought for $180 is now 237 and BH says regular is 360. The 8TB are super expensive and probably provide more speed/features than that enclosure could handle??????
You could get two complete set ups for the price of the 8TB NVMe. Also do we know the reliability of these drives at this point? Just curious why you want 8TB at the moment.

 

[John Navitsky]

because you’re going over TB or 10Gb/s USB and that will be a limiting factor, I don’t see the point in getting a super fancy drive.

tbh, unless you have specific needs, i’d probably just get the pre-built one. the important part is going to be that the module makes good contact with the thermal pad and you can assume OWC’s pre-built configurations will

as far as i can tell, this particular drive setup should be super reliable due to how well heat sinked it is, plus no fan so no moving parts

but you do want to use high quality modules. i think the owc should be fine, otherwise i like samsung. but as long as you get a good module i think there’s no reason to think it won’t be reliable

i will say i think the only bad thing about these cases is since it’s a milled out block of aluminum, there’s not a good way to adjust for different thickness modules

 

[Calson]

I had two Samsung EVO M.2 modules fail and that was with an excellent board that used both thermal paste and a very large heat sink. The cards are going to run hotter than one inserted into the motherboard where there is nothing to restrict airflow around it.

There is the mistaken assumption that an SSD because there are no moving parts it is going to be reliable and this is not the case. All electronic devices fail at some point in time and a SSD has additional vulnerabilities with its dependency on a storage pool that "shrinks" over time.

Mirrored drives, regardless of type, is the bare minimum for data security in the long run.

 

[PhotoLover]

I had two Samsung EVO M.2 modules fail and that was with an excellent board that used both thermal paste and a very large heat sink. The cards are going to run hotter than one inserted into the motherboard where there is nothing to restrict airflow around it.

There is the mistaken assumption that an SSD because there are no moving parts it is going to be reliable and this is not the case. All electronic devices fail at some point in time and a SSD has additional vulnerabilities with its dependency on a storage pool that "shrinks" over time.

Mirrored drives, regardless of type, is the bare minimum for data security in the long run.

At least one cloud provider thinks SSDs are the same or more reliable than HDDs:

Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul

Backblaze tracks reliability for thousands of HDDs and SSDs in its data centers.

arstechnica.com

I wouldn't claim that SSDs are more reliable based on that data, but I think they are on a par at least with HDDs with current designs.

Mirrored drives, or just a backup of a drive, plus a third copy elsewhere is the key (3 copies).

 

[John Navitsky]

As Calson said, SSD drives do wear/shrink, however with normal consumer uses this is really not a factor. You will want to replace the drive (because it's too small) sooner than you have to because it is "used up".

This is less the case for cloud providers where the drives may get used very hard on an ongoing basis. So the fact Backblaze doesn't report the drives are used up within the 8 year reporting period is a pretty good shout out.

All that said:

if your SSD drive mfg has a maint. utility, it's good to use that. these can be used to verify your cards are running at reasonable temperatures, monitor wear levels, find out about and update firmware if needed as well as find out about any errors on the drives

if the drive shows it is running hot, something needs to be adjusted, perhaps there is an issue with the heat sink situation, or perhaps the overall case needs some cooling adjustments. but knowing about it is half the battle and these tools are telling you the temps the actual module are seeing

there are some caveats here. i don't think these utilities will typically work through usb connections, at least on windows, because the windows usb drive driver doesn't support it. so this really works for SSDs that are internal, and i think it will work through thunderbolt as well

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[Calson]

Ignored is that when a SSD fails it does so completely and without warning. With my hard drives I can monitory their S.M.A.R.T health and disc operating temperatures and set alerts if a threshold is passed. I can also run Disk Analysis for $5 per drive per year and have AI analysis and prediction of failures of individual drives. I have none of these options with a SSD, much less with a M.2 module.

My hard drives go into sleep mode after an hour of non access and I have my NAS set to shut down at midnight and startup automatically at 8am so the are not active 33% of the time which extends their useful life.

I have had two out of two M.2 SSD modules fail in a 18-month period as compared to 1 out of 5 NAS hard drives in the past 65 months and that drive started to fail within the first week of use and was replaced under warranty.

The problems with Backblaze with respect to MTBF is that this can vary widely between different hard drives. A few years ago a particular Western Digital hard drive was experiencing premature failure from improper build procedures at the factory. I myself have noted that with NAS specific hard drives that the 7200 rpm ones run 20 degrees hotter than the 5400 rpm ones and so the faster ones can be expected to fail after fewer hours.

I use SSD drives in a variety of formats/configurations when the data can be backed up to a NAS or where the loss of the data is not important. Lower cost and convenience are the deciding factors in some situations.

 

[John Navitsky]

Totally not trying to start a fight here, but ANY drive can and will fail without warning and both SSDs and traditional spinning disks these days implement S.M.A.R.T and it is prudent to monitor

Also, let me be clear i am not trying to invalidate your experience. In the early days we used some Intel SSDs and ALL of them failed.

 

[Calson]

This thread got hijacked as the post was about the forthcoming USB 4.0 for Windows computers. This was developed by Intel but the licensing costs were considered to be too high for computer motherboard manufacturers to incorporate it. It is not the same as Thunderbolt iterations. More information at this URL

Thunderbolt 4 vs USB4: What's the difference?

The key differences between Thunderbolt 4 and USB4, explained

www.tomsguide.com