 On last week's episode of Linus Cobbles Something Together, we made an SSD out of a bunch of micro SD cards and this PCB we bought off some Chinese site. It was super dumb. Overall, I'd say it was a waste of both time and money. But, not to be deterred by little things like that, we are back at it again with another DIY memory product. Today, we will be making our own USB thumb drive. Will it be awesome or will it be awful? I'll let you know after I tell you about the ZOTAC MEC-1, a compact desktop PC built for gaming and featuring a sleek robotic style design. You can check it out at the link below. Okay, so we've cleared away everything that we don't immediately need. So let's go ahead and crack open an MS-09. This is a brand new one. Haven't used it yet. Comes with a little screwdriver, little screw. Comes with a little enclosure and yeah, that's about it. So there are other M.2 enclosures on the market that let you turn a regular drive into an SSD. But what we like about this one is that it doesn't require an external power cable in addition to the USB plug on it. And it's got kind of a nice sort of aluminum sandblasted finish on it. I mean everything Silverstone does kind of has a nice aluminum sandblasted finish on it. But that's not a terrible thing to be known for. Disassembly, fairly straightforward. Oh my goodness. This piece pushes this piece which has little nubbins that stick into the PCB. It's the whole PCB that slides back and forth. That is not the least janky mechanism I have ever seen. In their defense, maybe they all work that way. I don't know. I haven't taken apart a whole lot of USB drives, but that doesn't seem like the best solution. All right. Now let's go ahead and get our M.2 installed. We picked a random M.2 that we had on the shelf downstairs. You can't quite go full random. This particular drive right here is not compatible with NVMe M.2 SSD. So that means that you either have to use one with a B key or a B plus M key. So as long as it's one that is SATA or AHCI and it should say that somewhere on the SSD and it's 4260 or 80 millimeters long, it should theoretically both fit and function. The other decision we have to make with respect to our SSD is which size to go with. So we went with a 500 gig for a couple of reasons. So this little guy just kind of goes on here. Again, this is not the most amazing mounting system I've ever seen. The screw goes in here then. Reason number one was that we figured by the time you're spending 35 bucks on just the raw PCB and enclosure to make your own USB drive, you probably want something that's got more capacity than the, you know, commodity one that they were handing out at the last convention you were at. And number two, we wanted to see the best possible performance out of our DIY drive and higher capacity drives do have a tendency to perform a little bit better than the lower ones. And you can actually get a full explanation for why that is in the Tech Quickie video up here. Oh, wow. Why is there an extra screw? Anywho, with all of that said, I'm still not expecting to get anywhere near the speeds advertised on the box, 10 gigabit per second, because of an inherent limitation of the product. An AHCI or a SATA M.2 SSD can only go as high as 6 gigabit. So at best, the benefit we're getting from a Gen 2 chipset is another gigabit per second. But I mean, hey, any benefit is a benefit and I'll take it. Let's get some performance tests going. Let's get some performance tests going. Okay, so let's meet all of our contestants. I'm gonna have this guy plugged in here just for convenient size comparison as we go through. Let's start with a regular old USB drive. You can see by comparison, it takes up very little of the space around it and doesn't stick out nearly so far off the back of the system, obviously. Now, in terms of our tests, we're gonna keep things pretty simple today and just copy a 10 gig file to and from our drives. Now, this would not be a suitable test if this was a boot SSD. But because these are just external drives and this is absolutely the intended use case, it's perfectly acceptable in this context. Alright, so at about 55 megabytes per second writes and just shy of 140 megabytes per second reads, even our commodity drive is definitely taking advantage of USB 3 versus USB 2, but it's a low capacity drive and those write speeds, if you actually had, you know, a 500 gig drive would be pretty painful if it was a drive that you used very frequently to fill up and then offload data from because it would take you over two and a half hours to fill a 500 gig drive at these speeds, even if the offload is not nearly so bad, almost three times as fast. Let's plug in the DataTravna Ultimate GT. Now, if you were gonna actually plug this directly into the back of your computer, even with the skinniest possible device, you can see I'm nowhere near being able to put that in there. I actually can't even access the ones next to it on this side and even the type C port. I cannot get into if there's like any sleeve whatsoever on the cable here. So yeah, that's why they include this thing so you can hang it off the back of your drive. Okay, that's not bad. Write speeds are a little slow, but read speeds are very good at over 350 megs a second. So if it weren't for the cost and that it's just not much more convenient of a form factor compared even to an external drive with a dongle, this would be a lot more compelling. For our next trick, we've got the T5 Portable SSD. Now, this has the advantage of easy access to all the ports around it and even the ability to use different connectors, like if you wanted a type C to type C, like the one that I have right here, but the drawback is that you always need a cable. That was faster than I was expecting. That is more like I was expecting. Wait, no, also very, very fast. Well, how did James get those other results? Our pre-video preparation failed us. We still had write caching enabled for this drive, so let's go ahead and change that, which for some reason requires a restart. We'll be right back. And thanks to the magic of video editing, we are back immediately. That is more like what I was expecting. Actually, that's still better than I was expecting, but this is within the realm of possibility. So with results like that, it's no mystery why these things have gotten so popular. Let's find out if our DIY SSD USB solution can compare. Oh, interesting. So it shows up as the WD SSD, but a USB device. How cool. Not bad. And read speeds are really good. These are actually the best results we've seen so far. Wow, not too shabby. Bottom line then, you do lose out on the ability to install regular USBs or even type Cs with the extra space afforded by them on either side of it. But you can easily put something, even something fairly bulky right above it. If you don't mind them kind of going like this a bit. And in terms of performance per dollar, with our AHCI M.2, it actually looks not bad. Oh, it should be noted that your mileage may vary. If you put a slower or cheaper drive in here, maybe you ended up getting one of these because you had an M.2 drive lying around from before an upgrade or something like that, then your results will be different. But from our perspective, the big winners are really, well, honestly everything but this. Because these are cheap and like kind of good enough. 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