[smartmontools-support] Comments on quality of NVME to USB adapters?

B b at mydomainnameisbiggerthanyours.com
Thu Jan 9 23:00:57 CET 2020


Christian et all

Do you have any comments on the quality and reliability of NVME to USB 
bridge chips which have come to market in the last year or two?

The four chips I'm aware of are the Asmedia ASM2362, the Realtek 
RTL9210, the JMicron JMS562, and the JMicron JMS583.

The JMicron JMS583 seems like it's the most popular, and I have an 
adapter with this chip in it, but it's very flakey and I've given up 
trying to use it as a portable linux boot drive because it sometimes 
won't show up in boot menus and I get USB hangs and timeouts for no 
apparent reason.

I have been able to successfully get some info from my drive with 
smartctl -d sntjmicron. This is especially helpful because it's obvious 
my drive is thermal throttling when it hits it's thermal limits, and I 
can get thermal information from smartctl. It seems like my drive gets 
hotter on this bridge chip than it does in my normal PC, which is strange.

The Realtek chip just came out six months ago and it's only in a very 
small number of products so far. Asus has an adapter in the works for it 
and I think others will too. I don't see any mention of support for it 
in smartmontools yet.

It looks like ticket 1221 is tracking support for the Asmedia chip via 
-d sntasmedia! That's great. Does this actually work yet? 
https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1221

I also see you have a cool wiki page for NVME support. This is great:

https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/NVMe_Support
https://www.smartmontools.org/query?status=!closed&keywords=~nvme

So, any comments on these different adapter bridge chips and which might 
be more reliable, featureful, or performant than others?

Thanks!



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