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I bought a Silverstone MS12 NVMe external enclosure and Silverstone ECU06 PCIe Type-C expansion card.
The included instructions were pretty rubbish. There was some more detail on the Silverstone web site, but still not enough to get a new M2 drive working in the enclosure in Win10.
The main problem is that Window10 (and 7 & 8 )
don't allow the partitioning of a USB drive, not even to create a single partition. If the drive can't be partitioned, then it also can't be formatted. USB flash drives come preformatted so this isn't a problem. But M2 NVMe drives normally don't come pre-partitioned and formatted.
So this is what you see when you plug in your new M2 drive via the Silverstone MS12 enclosure. The drive isn't initialized and there no option to fix it.
The solution is to use ImageUSB to partition and format the drive.
Download link is here
https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html
Download the tool, pick the "Reformat" option. Double check you are formatting the correct drive and you are done.
Once you are done, you can optionally run some PerformanceTest benchmarks to see how fast it really is.
("Advanced drive test" under the Advanced menu)
M2 Drive used in the enclosure was a Kingston NV1 M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB. Empty and formatted with NTFS.
Test machine was Ryzen 5 5600x, 32GB RAM.
Initial test below was on motherboard's USB-C port on a ASRock B550M Pro4 motherboard, this is only a 10Gbit/sec port however.
The advertised speed of enclosure is 20Gbit/sec.
The advertised speed of the Kingston SSD was ~17Gbit/sec.
However the best benchmark speed, in the best scenario, is 850MB/sec, which is 6.8Gbit/sec.
The worst was 21MB/sec, which is 0.17Gbit/sec. This reflects the higher latency compared to an internal M2 drive.
So not even half the advertised speed (in the best case on ASRock's motherboard USB-C port).
If I can get the Silverstone ECU06 Gen2x2 (20Gbit/sec) card working I can test again. For the moment however Silverstone ECU06 is failing to detect any drives that are connected to it.
Benchmark below:
Update:
So it seems the Silverstone ECU06 might have compatibility problems with some motherboards. It only works in 1 of the 2 I tried and other reviewers reported the same issue.
When it does work these are the results.
We are now getting between 0.22Gbit/sec and 11Gbit/sec depending on the test setup. Which still seems a long way from the advertised 17 to 20Gbit/s.
The included instructions were pretty rubbish. There was some more detail on the Silverstone web site, but still not enough to get a new M2 drive working in the enclosure in Win10.
The main problem is that Window10 (and 7 & 8 )
don't allow the partitioning of a USB drive, not even to create a single partition. If the drive can't be partitioned, then it also can't be formatted. USB flash drives come preformatted so this isn't a problem. But M2 NVMe drives normally don't come pre-partitioned and formatted.So this is what you see when you plug in your new M2 drive via the Silverstone MS12 enclosure. The drive isn't initialized and there no option to fix it.
The solution is to use ImageUSB to partition and format the drive.
Download link is here
https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html
Download the tool, pick the "Reformat" option. Double check you are formatting the correct drive and you are done.
Once you are done, you can optionally run some PerformanceTest benchmarks to see how fast it really is.
("Advanced drive test" under the Advanced menu)
M2 Drive used in the enclosure was a Kingston NV1 M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB. Empty and formatted with NTFS.
Test machine was Ryzen 5 5600x, 32GB RAM.
Initial test below was on motherboard's USB-C port on a ASRock B550M Pro4 motherboard, this is only a 10Gbit/sec port however.
The advertised speed of enclosure is 20Gbit/sec.
The advertised speed of the Kingston SSD was ~17Gbit/sec.
However the best benchmark speed, in the best scenario, is 850MB/sec, which is 6.8Gbit/sec.
The worst was 21MB/sec, which is 0.17Gbit/sec. This reflects the higher latency compared to an internal M2 drive.
So not even half the advertised speed (in the best case on ASRock's motherboard USB-C port).
If I can get the Silverstone ECU06 Gen2x2 (20Gbit/sec) card working I can test again. For the moment however Silverstone ECU06 is failing to detect any drives that are connected to it.
Benchmark below:
Update:
So it seems the Silverstone ECU06 might have compatibility problems with some motherboards. It only works in 1 of the 2 I tried and other reviewers reported the same issue.
When it does work these are the results.
We are now getting between 0.22Gbit/sec and 11Gbit/sec depending on the test setup. Which still seems a long way from the advertised 17 to 20Gbit/s.
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