Sabrent USB 3.2 Enclosure + Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe SSD On Linux Performance

For those looking at an NVMe PCIe M.2 solid-state drive enclosure for connecting to USB 3.1/3.2 systems, Sabrent offers a nice option with their EC-TFNB enclosure that is constructed out of aluminum, 100% tool-free, and runs well. I recently bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure along with the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, which offers nice performance for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and the 2TB capacity can be found for just about $250 USD.

I bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure and 2TB NVMe solid-state drive to serve as another local Steam cache. While the Phoronix Test Suite's Phoromatic makes caching on the LAN transparent for benchmark test files, etc, Steam games are the exception. Not to mention with the sizes of today's games, it's always much easier having an external drive for the Steam data. In replacing a SATA 3.0 2TB SSD that has begun failing, I picked up the Sabrent EC-TFNB enclosure and for going with that was the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB.

Both the enclosure and drive have been running well for about two months now without any complains for either. The performance has also been great.

Prior to commissioning this external 2TB drive setup, I ran some benchmarks of the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive when it was connected to the motherboard directly in an M.2 slot and then again when running when connected to the system via this tool-free enclosure to a USB 3.2 port on the system.

Tests were done on an Intel Core i9 10900K system with Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER motherboard. Ubuntu 20.04 was running on this system with the Linux 5.7 kernel and the Sabrent drive was formatted to EXT4 with the default mount options. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various benchmarks were run for seeing how the performance of this drive is impacted by running within the Sabrent USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure.