Category: storage

Dual OWC Express 4M2 chassis (#P46)

Another thing literally nobody asked for: A 3D printed chassis to house two OWC 4M2 quad NVMe to Thunderbolt adapters

Well, all of my NVMe activity of the recent months had to lead to something – the Blueendless USB dock (WHL #104), the Samsung 970 Evo Plus (WHL #106) (and the other Samsung 970 Evo Plus), as well as the AliExpress shenanigans with the fake drives in WHL #92 and WHL #95. I feel like now is the time to make changes to my always unwieldy RAID and backup strategy, as technology, pricing and size is finally where it needs to be to fit my needs. […]

18th May 2025 18th May 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Important correction on Samsung 970 Evo Plus revisions (WHL #106F1)

“Houston, we got a problem….the fake news detector just went off!”

THE WHAT?

In all seriousness, my previous post contained a factual error. One that I discovered after spending my own money to specifically buy two 970 Evo Plus SSDs of the new revision. Two brand new ones to be precise (wouldn’t really call it NOS, but eBay is currently full of unopened late 2023 drives for very close to street prices, not sure what’s going on), so the seller only posted pictures of the package with fully intact seal. And when I opened it earlier this week…well, two “old” ones popped out. […]

2nd March 2025 3rd March 2025 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

The Samsung 970 Evo Plus – and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus (WHL #106)

! ! ! IMPORTANT: ALSO READ WHL #106F1 FOR A MAJOR CORRECTION ON PACKAGING. ! ! !

Quick PSA, as this isn’t common knowledge and I only stumbled upon it after purchasing FIVE disks for my future RAID array…: There are TWO revisions of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD!

Sadly, I’m too lazy to either wipe off my marker or digitally remove it, so it’s not too hard to spot the difference:

Well, the two drives in the center are the newer ones, despite having date codes 02/2022 and 10/2023, while the others were made in 08/2021 and 05/2023 (!). […]

17th February 2025 3rd March 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Blueendless External SSD Hard Disk NVME Enclosure 10G Online Reading Writing Speed SSD Case For M.2 NVME SD Docking Station (WHL #104)

Ah, well, it’s December already, the time for some larger hardware changes (when people have some spare time in case things go wrong, which they often do – and some even have a higher budget at that time).

Storage. Once again.

So I was pondering about my options. Yeah, the 836 Supermicro case with its 16 LFF bays is terrific, and I like the options in terms of computing power and hard drives (including the cheapo options of “small, but very many”) very much. But it’s inconvenient to use when powering off after access, or terribly expensive when running it 24/7 (electricity is 0.3€/kWh!). […]

1st December 2024 2nd December 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

MicroSD speed comparison – genuine cards and a Chinese fake (WHL #96)

Since I don’t want to become the BigClive of the text blogging world, I pretty much have to stop rambling about fake flash drives (NVMe, SATA SSD, USB drives and SD cards) from China. Clive himself knows that too much ozone content makes his audience yawn ;)

So, as Easter (read: the couple holidays around it) is a great opportunity to run some backups and digitally clean up the place, here’s a quick speed test comparison on the history of MicroSD cards. It all started with my troublesome RPi4 having high iostat values all the time, leading to a new card for my laptop backup drive, which in return handed down his MicroSD to the Pi. […]

31st March 2024 16th June 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Brand New Portable SSD 1TB 2TB External Hard Drive Type-C USB 3.0 High-Speed External Storage Hard Disks For Laptops/Desktop/Mac (WHL #95)

AliExpress and their stupid game rules finally made me (inadvertently) buy* something that I heard about at least 13 years ago…a full-sized USB hard disk that only houses a tiny USB stick!

*Ackchyually, that is not quite correct. Like with the NVMe drive of WHL #92 that took me a long time to get refunded (and it only happened via PayPal, since AE to this day strongly believes in returns to fake warehouses in Afghanistan), this one also ended in a dispute and now I get to return it in exchange for a full refund. This time, though, to a warehouse in Germany, so I unfortunately cannot keep it, but now that I know how to find these…

But first things first, this is the fake USB drive that I remember seeing all over the interwebs:

Funny back then, but it probably consisted of a fully working USB drive, just a very small one compared to the expected HDD. […]

17th March 2024 18th March 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

2023 New Original SSD 990 PRO M2 2280 Nvme PCIe Gen 4.0X4 2TB 4TB Internal Solid State Disk SSD HDD for Laptop/PS5/PC (WHL #92)

Fake flash from China today!

Fake drives have been around for quite some time now, it started out as USB flash drives emulating 2.5″ regular hard disks, scamming some tourists into buying worthless drives (and a pair of hex nuts, to simulate the weight). While classic spinning rust is basically dead for most people’s data transfer needs, fake flash has evolved. Nowadays, a lot of trash flash seems to end up in super-high capacity drives for pennies. There are legit 1 and 2TB USB flash drives, but those are 50€+ and 150€+ respectively, while the Chinesium ones stack up to 128TB and cost less than a tenner (more fake capacity still costs more money, obviously). […]

21st January 2024 22nd January 2024 By Bzzz In 1 Comment