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andyprough

Member

Registered: 2019-10-19

Posts: 327  

Unexpected - Devuan on external Nvme out-performing MX on internal

So I got a birthday gift of a big, fast 2TB Nvme stick recently, and bought a relatively expensive Nvme drive enclosure to use it as an external drive. I plugged it into a USB3 slot on my main laptop, partitioned it and installed Devuan to one large partition using normal installation procedure off of a live USB stick. Told uefi to boot to that partition first, and it worked. Tried it on the USB-C slot but this laptop won't boot from USB-C at this time. Bit of a shame because read/write speeds are more than double on USB-C.

However...

What intrigued me is that the laptop is running better and snappier with this external Nvme on USB3 with Devuan than it does with MX on the internal Nvme stick. I wasn't sure it would run at all, but it is a beast. I've even run Windows in a vm on it and the performance was excellent.

The Nvme enclosure is a good one, stays cool all the time unless I'm transferring in excess of about 20-30gb of data, at which point it heats up a bit, but still not hot enough to be a concern. The enclosure is all metal with airflow vents and with thermal pads between the Nvme chip and the metal frame. The company making it is called "plugable", and apparently they used to make a model with a crappy chipset that overheated frequently, but since they moved their enclosure to a realtek chipset last year it's been reportedly staying cool and staying connected for other reviewers. I agree with this assessment. It was plug and play, no setup required.

I'm sure this Nvme will run much faster once I install it internally and replace the older Nvme. But in the meantime I'm enjoying it as a very fast portable. I'm going to try it on some other systems soon and see if it is totally portable, or if it will throw up errors when plugged into different systems than the one it was installed on.

I'm assuming the increased performance is because I'm simply using a better Nvme than whatever cheap one Asus put in this laptop. But it could also be that Devuan is significantly out-performing MX for some reason. I'd be curious to hear any of your thoughts.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,171  

Re: Unexpected - Devuan on external Nvme out-performing MX on internal

First of all compare data sheet read/write speeds of the NVMEs. I would guess the new large one is faster than the internal one.

I just replaced the 256G NVME WD Blue in my Aspire 5 against a 1T Crucial P5. It makes a difference.

rolfie