Most mid-range notebooks in 2024 now come with USB 3.2 Gen 2 support, which means the maximum data transfer rate is about 10 Gbit/s. While that is nice, it’s even nicer to see that more expensive notebooks now also support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with 20 Gbit/s, and even USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 with 40 Gbit/s. (see here for details). Higher speeds are particularly useful for copying large amounts of data from one NVMe to another, as even low end SSDs support datarates of well over 1 GB/s, i.e. over 10 Gbit/s. When it comes to prices for NVMe to USB adapters, there is a large spread in the market, depending which speed a product supports. So I thought I’d document the current status here to see how things develop in the future.
In 2024, entry level USB to NVMe adapters are limited to 10 Gbit/s and cost around 20 euros. Moving up to 20 Gbit/s, and USB to NVMe adapter prices jump up around 55 euros. And for a 40 Gbit/s adapter, I’m currently still getting prices of 90 euros. Quite steep. So would it be worth to upgrade? The answer to that is not straight forward and I’ll have a look at this in the next post.