Anyone used those small NGFF / M.2 USB enclosures?

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frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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Doing a small NAS build, the mobo (E3C236D2i) has 6 SATA ports I want to use exclusively for drives and I don't want to use an HBA in the expansion slot (want 10 gig or additional networking ports). However there is an onboard USB 3.0 port I was thinking of using with some sort of boot device.

Was looking on Amazon a while back and took notice of some NGFF / M.2 enclosures.

Example: https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-Ex...1517921637&sr=1-28&keywords=m.2+usb+enclosure

Anyone have experience with these and was it positive/negative? I'll probably just end up installing FreeNAS or something but I don't want to use straight up traditional USB flash drives, even if these bottle neck the max traditional storage performance I would still end up with better performance than most flash drives. I think someone said their 850 Evo still gets around 350/330 read/write after plugged into one of these in a USB 3.0 port.
 

Schoondoggy

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Apr 26, 2017
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Doing a small NAS build, the mobo (E3C236D2i) has 6 SATA ports I want to use exclusively for drives and I don't want to use an HBA in the expansion slot (want 10 gig or additional networking ports). However there is an onboard USB 3.0 port I was thinking of using with some sort of boot device.

Was looking on Amazon a while back and took notice of some NGFF / M.2 enclosures.

Example: https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-Ex...1517921637&sr=1-28&keywords=m.2+usb+enclosure

Anyone have experience with these and was it positive/negative? I'll probably just end up installing FreeNAS or something but I don't want to use straight up traditional USB flash drives, even if these bottle neck the max traditional storage performance I would still end up with better performance than most flash drives. I think someone said their 850 Evo still gets around 350/330 read/write after plugged into one of these in a USB 3.0 port.
On the E3C236D2i are the USB 3.0 ports active at boot?

Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk
 

frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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I don't see why not, what's the point of an onboard USB 3.0 plug if it's not meant to be used as some kind of boot device? It's a C236 chipset (Skylake). Maybe there's a gotcha I'm not aware of involving NGFF disks you're about to tell me about lol.

I consulted the manual but don't see anything about it one way or the other.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I have used a SATA m.2 to USB 3.0 and it worked fine. I often keep one as an external travel drive.