Storage Solutions Using a portable SSD as a regular drive

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meetdilip

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Is it going to be harmful if we use a portable SSD as a regular drive? For example, add a .vdi file to it related to VirtualBox and run Windows 11 from it. Not all the time, occasionally?

Or is it better to use it only to store files and backups?
 
though you won't be getting the full advertised speeds on the ssd if you aren't using a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. It will work though for normal workloads but don't load things like games on it if you were even considering that.
 
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No games, simply Firefox, Bing, Edge etc.

To be honest I do not know whether I have a 3.0 or 3.2 port. My laptop is 2 years old. I am using the cable that came with the SSD.
 
meetdilip said:
No games, simply Firefox, Bing, Edge etc.

To be honest I do not know whether I have a 3.0 or 3.2 port. My laptop is 2 years old. I am using the cable that came with the SSD.
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You are fine either way if you're just planning to use it for basic browsing and stuff. Though USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 would have made great difference in terms of speed but since your laptop is not much older than 2 years you must be having one of them. Check the specifications on the web by entering your laptop's model number to verify if you actually have a faster USB port and use that one for the SSD.
 
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USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, which is pretty much the limit of SATA SSDs anyway (6 Gbps is not that much farther than 5). Realistically, I have seen speeds up to 500 MBps on SATA SSDs over USB 3.0. This is plenty fast even for games and such as well.
The real benefit of SSDs is the instantaneous seek. Real world work loads, even games, don't have single file of multiple GBs, they have many many small files. That's where the instantaneous seek comes in handy.

People routinely overstate the importance of fast transfer rates. That helps, but don't underestimate how fast 5 GBps is. Unless you routinely deal with multi-GB files, you're never going to notice any difference between a SATA SSD and an NVMe SSD.
 
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I have that small, cute one from SanDisk , 1 TB.

But the transfer speed is mostly 54 - 60 MBPs when I tried last week. It starts with 150 + MBps and then comes down to this range in a few minutes. The transfer is over by that time though.

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