What about performance concerns? This sounds unbearably slow, especially for someone accustomed to an NVME SSD. Not sure why you would do that to yourself when cloud backups are an option.
I have been using for several years bootable Thunderbolt 3 SSD's (on Linux).
As those are equivalent with 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes, exactly like the internal M.2 type M SSD slots, there is no performance difference.
Only the latest laptops with Tiger Lake, and the laptops with Ryzen 5xxx to be introduced soon, have PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, so they will be able to have faster internal SSD's.
I expect that the interconnection standards for external devices will also continue to be improved, restoring parity with the internal devices.
I tried this for a bit and noticed a huge performance drop. Also noticed system freezing.
I have an NVME 2.0TB drive in a USB-C enclosure and while fast as an external this is not fast enough for booting and running the dozen or so apps I keep open on my MBP.
Keep in mind that USB-C != Thunderbolt 3. Yes, the latter also physically connects to a USB-C form port, but it's totally different. It's quite confusing and sad.
USB-C is super slow for this. You need to use Thunderbolt NVME enclosures which can run the NVME at PCIe 3.0 x 4 speed. I have 5 and RAID them together, which handily beats the internal drive for speed by about 2x.
I haven't noticed any performance degradation which is counter intuitive because I really expected there to be one. The Samsung T5 - T7s have been great in my experience. As for the cloud .. well that has it's own challenges too. Currently I'm trying to deGoogle myself and not doing a great job at it.
To address any conventional SSD vs NVMe SSDs performance gap maybe consider and external NVMe SSD!
PCIe costs you less than a microsecond of latency. A good SSD has 60 microseconds of latency. You're not going to notice any difference from moving the controller.
Not so long ago SSDs didn't exists and people were using their PC just fine. Today's high performance portable SSD are miles ahead of the 10000rpm "fast" internal HDDs from back in the days
Software has bloated so much that users having an SSD is an assumption. In fact a 2.5 SATA SSD is almost unbearable on a modern machine for gaming, etc. since M2/NVME showed up.
Kinda yeah, but just to set expectations -- if you want to do an external hard drive as your main drive, just get a thunderbolt drive. You might be able to massage a usable experience out of USB, but thunderbolt is more or less equivalent to an internal drive.
The technical details may differ between if my data is stored on an SSD I'm accessing locally that I booted from, vs if my data is stored in the cloud and I'm accessing it via a web browser, but at the end of the day, I have access to my files. The technical differences have many practical ramifications (eg disk speed), but they are sufficiently practically equivalent for many different use cases. We see this with Chromebooks, where they will never be a full replacement for every windows machine. There is a large reason they've gained marketshare, however.
Not that that means anything for performance. NVMe just means that it uses PCIe.
Since the external port is USB, the internal use of NVMe is actually a downside. The drive actually has two separate circuit boards inside. One of them takes up space and power just to convert NVMe to USB, and wouldn't exist in a better design.
Computers run mostly from RAM and network. Unless you are doing heavy disk work, nvme isn't a big deal. You can use internal disk for temporary projects (compiling, video editing) and then copy the snapshot to external at end of day.
Tell that to my work iMac with a HDD (not my choice) and a new enough OS to require APFS. The only programs I typically have open are Chrome and a music player, and it freezes randomly, and Chrome is constantly waiting on cache.
It's not that bad … for what I'm doing, and I can do something else when the computer stalls. I've thought about an external TBT SSD, but doesn't seem worth it yet.
I dunno man, ssds are pretty basic fare these days. They have been standard for about a decade now. If an employer refuses to give their developers ssds to work off, that's a massive sign of disrespect IMO.
I agree with that! But I'm not a developer. I'm doing hardware repairs, and this machine is to read ticket notes and enter repair info and send emails (and play my music :-).
