Sabrent EC-SS31: A $10 USB 3.1 To SATA 2.5-Inch Drive Adapter

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Sabrent EC-SS31: A $10 USB 3.1 To SATA 2.5-Inch Drive Adapter

If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=USB-3.1-Adapter-Linux-Tests

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Currently this drive can be found for $9.99 USD on Amazon if this is what you're after.

(it's not a drive)

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Maybe an eSATA adapter could be Handy for SSDs. With a desktop you could just add a eSATA Adapter to the back.

[wagaf]

Nice review !

I wonder why the SQLite performance is so good with the Sabrent compared to the StarTech enclosure while nor random or sequential read/write where faster.

edit: random read is actually faster, might cause the performance difference ?

[schmidtbag]

Well for that price I guess the performance is pretty good, but still a little disappointing that it doesn't really offer any real benefit over USB 3.0.

Did you test it on a Gen2 port? Gen1 isn't 10Gbps.

[linuxgeex]

I personally own two of these and they work brilliantly. It basically turns any 2.5" SATA drive into a portable external drive. It's great with GParted. I can dupe most HDD's at near their rated performance levels.

It doesn't quite keep up with SATA3 spec but it still provides a level of performance for my ancient Crucial M4 such that I can't tell whether I booted it from the host SATA connector or USB3.

Michael You could add this SATA2PATA adapter to the article to use with the Sabrent adapter so they can access 44-pin 2.5" IDE drives as well.

[starshipeleven]

@Micheael linuxgeex could you please test if you can see SMART attributes and send commands to the SSD/drive from this thing? (gnome-disks or hdparm commandline tool)

This is good to have on Linux.

[hajj_3]

Well for that price I guess the performance is pretty good, but still a little disappointing that it doesn't really offer any real benefit over USB 3.0.

If you have a decent 2.5" ssd you are bottlenecked by usb 3.0's 5gbps as those ssd's support ~6gbps so you could get a small speed improvement with a usb 3.1 type 2 drive. Would be nice if someone did a real world benchmark test with a good ssd on a usb 3.0 and usb 3.1 type 2 so that we know exactly what speed improvement there is.

[wagaf]

If you have a decent 2.5" ssd you are bottlenecked by usb 3.0's 5gbps as those ssd's support ~6gbps so you could get a small speed improvement with a usb 3.1 type 2 drive. Would be nice if someone did a real world benchmark test with a good ssd on a usb 3.0 and usb 3.1 type 2 so that we know exactly what speed improvement there is.

Supposedly the products has "USB 3.1 high-speed supports up to 10Gbps data rate" (from the Amazon product page), so USB 3.1 gen 2.

[coder]

Why are you guys so hung up on link datarate? Did you actually look at the benchmarks? Clearly, that's not the primary issue, here.

How is this situation remotely acceptable, in 2017? The only good option we have for external drives is eSATA, which has basically gone the way of the dinosaurs.

I really hate to say this, but now I'm actually starting to get behind Thunderbolt (which I don't classify as good due to being another Apple/Intel proprietary standard). But, at least it should offer native SATA3 and NVMe performance.