Affordable USB storage solutions - market review

Recently I helped out someone with a data recovery and as a followup I offered to help them out with some sort of external storage backup solution that would prevent data loss in the future.

The usual approach would be to use a USB flash drive. However most of the currently available flash drives from Aliexpress and even local stores provides slow (20-200 MB/s) drives that might be unreliable, and in the case of Aliexpress some of the drives are even advertised with fake capacity.

Thus I had to do a little market research and find out what would work.

My goal was to have a:

• reliable,

• fast,

• affordable

external storage solution.

I found out that such solution would likely involve using an external SSD enclosure.

The most important part is the controller chip of the enclosure. Based on my research there are three main chips used:

• RTL9210 / RTL9210B - the best there is, no overheating, no throttling, stable, and there are recent firmware updates for the RTL2910B chip

• ASM2362 - seems to have good reviews, not that popular

• JMS583 - worst, overheats causing thermal throttling, high power draw might cause disconnecting in some USB ports, most of the enclosures on Aliexpress use this family of chips

Here are some of my enclosures from Aliexpress that worked well:

1. UnionSine Dual Protocol M2 NVMe NGFF SATA SSD Case 10Gbps

• uses RTL9210B chip,

• best in its class, (in fact likely used by one of the RTL9210B firmware developers)

• supports multiple NVME drive types and sizes,

• aluminum body helps with heat dissipation,

• speeds up to 1000 MB/s,

• costs $10-13

2. USB 3.0/Type C HDD Enclosure 2.5 inch SATA SSD External Hard Drive Case

• uses RTL9201R,

• good choice if you want cheap, but reliable enclosure for the 2.5" SATA drives,

• plastic is a little flimsy,

• speeds up to 500 MB/s, costs $3-4

Also if you are a Linux user I suggest to checkout BTRFS filesystem, which seems really cool. The best part is the snapshots feature which essentially let you go back in time with your data which is great for recovery.

PS I: I realize this is a bit off-topic here, but I figured it might help someone. Let me know if you'd like to see more posts like this.

PS II: In terms of storage solutions comment down below what do you use, and what has worked and what didn't work at all.