Please Don't Buy This M.2 NVME Drive PCIE Adaptor Sabrent EC-PCIE

hi this is mike from mike's unboxing reviews and how to and on today's video we're going to take a look at possibly one of the most frustrating devices i've ever seen in my life for an m.2 drive but it may just save your bacon keep watching to find out more okay so today's video we're taking a look at this this is the sabrant it's got an unusual name it is the ec pcie very uh descriptive part number well done say run you've uh outdone yourselves there so what is this this is a m.2 mounting enclosure which translates to a pci express bus type connection so if you've got a spare pcie express slot on your motherboard now it does have to be a 16 time slot size which is gonna really rule this out for some people i'm not too sure where they've gone with the 16x type size but i guess it does make some sense it's easy to actually locate it into the motherboard because you can use the clip for the graphics card to actually hold the unit in place so yeah it does help in that so you don't need to actually screw into a pci express so if you have got a smaller form factor pc you don't have a full size slot then this was going to actually do the job very nicely also it's actually quite discreet once it's actually installed in the pc it's going to be very small not get in the way etc etc especially if you've got a graphics card above it all those kinds of things i should say straight away it doesn't necessarily need to be a pci express time 16 wired slot so what i mean by that is this is compatible with pci express times four times eight and times 16 slots nice times 16 sized but they have to be wired to the minimum of pci express four or times four so yeah hopefully that makes some sense also as well the pcr express generation of this technically i suppose you would say is a gen 3 because most lots of gen 3 but it will work with gen 4 and obviously gen 5 upcoming i would imagine it's going to be electrically compatible we don't know because we haven't seen pc express gen 5 slots yet but certainly for most people i think if you're trying to add an m.2 drive to a slot in this kind of way realistically you're probably going to be on an older pc express generation maybe two or three anyway without the way let's take a look at and i'll explain to you my frustrations so in the box what do you actually get so you don't get a drive that is mine i'll put that to one side ignore that entirely so you do get the obvious things so you get a little uh leaflet there about how to get in touch with sabrin and how to share the love you also get a very kind of basic instruction guide or installation manual which is actually part of the reason why i'm doing this video just to clarify a few things which are not in any way shape or form clear from the instruction manual you also get included a little handy screwdriver for doing those m.2 slots and that kind of stuff and for actually disassembling the drive caddy itself this is where it starts getting a little bit weird so these are basically m.2 thermal pads or just thermal pads they're double sided adhesive and you get three of them now one of them you get is running about 1.5 millimeters this one is i wouldn't even hesitate to guess maybe 0.5 and this one's probably about 0.5 as well so they're very narrow two tiny little ones and one thick one so this is where it starts getting strange because it doesn't actually tell you in the manual where these actually go where you should put them on the device itself so let's take a look at the device and things will probably become a little bit more transparent so this is the actual device itself this is actually pretty cost effective run about 15 pounds here in the uk from amazon.com uk put some links in the video description also as well some weird things which you may notice now but you'll definitely notice later when we actually power up there's four little holes there now at first i was wondering what are they for because obviously clearly they're not going to be for airflow but there are actually four leds on there which gives you an idea of obviously drive activity etc etc so we'll take a closer look at that later on i'm trying to give you some close-ups of it the rest of it is pretty much self-explanatory so we've got some heatsink fins there to dissipate heat from the m.2 drive you've obviously got your pci express mounting area here with the little clip on the end which you're used to seeing on graphics cards etc so that's what latches it into place so there's no pci express blanking plate or anything that goes on the back there so again for neatness you could put this in a pc and no one really even though it was there unless they actually physically looked inside it's all nicely blacked out as well so that's pretty good apart from obviously sabrin couldn't resist on stuffing their logo on the side there in white on a contrasting background so that's all well and good there are four screws on the back as you can probably make out and we'll give you some b-roll this so you can see a little bit clearer with the included screwdrivers you can undo all four screws and we'll take a little look inside and see what it's all about so with the screws undone it breaks down into the individual components so we've got the kind of like the back plate you can see there with the four screw holes in there we also got the front section and also you can see inside to the kind of internal section of the actual heatsink itself something which some of you may have want to kind of take notice of is the edges are rounded off as you can see you probably see this from close-ups much better but slightly rounded off so if you've got a drive similar to the uh slightly older xpg drives this is sx 6000 drive which some of them used to have like a metal plate on the top there which this one actually has a metal transfer plate which the xpg logo has put on to on some of these the actual square pieces in the corners you may find actually interfere with someone else so do bear that in mind you may need to peel your drive shield off in its entirety which potentially could invalidate your warranty so obviously do bear that in mind the real brains of this operation is uh this section here so this is your pci express card in its kind of naked form so you can probably make out there quite easily is the m.2 slot there so this is only going to work for nvme drives it will not work for sata based m.2 drives there are loads of other devices on the market which will do that this particular one is for pci express nvme drives only so and also drive sizes only up to 2280 which is this size here you can if you want to there is a little uh point there which you can unscrew and move it down so if you've got a slightly smaller drive then you can move it down into those little notches which are lower down this is where actually it started confusing me already other than the fact that those four leds on top which i kind of thought well not too sure what they're there for but hey yo first of all i thought there was going to be a screw to go into this m.2 mountain pillar as pretty much every motherboard that i've ever seen and ever looked at it's always had one of those mounting pillars and then a screw that goes into the top of it what they do slightly differently on this particular version is the screw is actually in the back so what you need to do is to first of all undo that screw and then the little brass plug there comes off and i'll try and get you close for this but it is actually so small is ridiculous there is like a little indentation in it so what you do is you actually get your m.2 drive and it literally just plugs in on the end so let me do that now so to the end there normally where your bolt would go down through your screw going through and hopefully you can see that and make it out you'll see it in some of the close-ups anyway so it's not a problem so then what you do is you then put your drive in on a 45 degree angle as you would normally wiggle it in and that lowers down into place and then you put the screw back in from the the rear section it all kind of plops into place and it makes total sense it didn't at first really confusing i was like where is the screw so if you're watching this video thinking same as i did where is the screw what is going on you don't actually need it and if you'd have read the instructions like i did eventually then you'd realize uh yeah that is exactly how it works so that is very simple and straightforward if you wanted to you could just install the drive just like this and in some instances that's gonna be absolutely fine because it this one that looks like it's got the cooling built in so it isn't uh necessary to have all this extra stuff literally all we need is a way of getting the m.2 into the pci express so where it starts got an interesting now is actually if you do want to put the thermal section back on so at the moment depending on obviously the drive that you're installing if you've got dram or any kind of controllers on the back of the drive you're going to want to put some sort of thermal interface in there so this is the game where it starts getting interesting we do have a section here which has got these kind of gold sections on so that is designed to transfer heat so in my mind what we're doing is putting one of the thinner pieces on then we're going to put our drive back in and that would then transfer the heat from the back of the drive into the uh the setup itself and then arguably this section on the back should transfer then to this section on the back so again you'd probably end up using the really thin piece on there and then put the back plate on et cetera et cetera therefore leaving you with the thick piece to put on the top of the drive as most kind of setups would with this kind of heatsink but what i found is when i do that when i put all back together those screws aren't long enough to go through all of it together so this is where it kind of it falls on its face a little bit now it could be because the extra fraction of width i've got there for that little metal plate which says xpg on there it is extremely fine it's literally kind of like i don't know a quarter of a millimeter if that is extremely thin almost paper thin so whether or not it would make much difference i don't know of course obviously what i could do is leave out the uh the thinner piece on the back here and just hope that this when it's screwed up actually does touch the back in some way there's not a great deal of heat generated from the back of the drive in this particular instance because there's very little on there there's two chips at the end which we'll probably touch that eventually but yeah it's not exactly foolproof so i think what is the best thing for me to do now is i'm going to try and work out with these thermal pads what actually works and what doesn't we'll pause the video now and then we'll come back a little bit later on with kind of what works for me in this particular setup obviously again yours may be slightly different hence why it would have been really nice for sabrin being that they actually make drives themselves they could have just saved us all this hassle and actually said right this is what you need to do this is where things need to go obviously the whole point of this if you look at it as a heatsink is is designed to transfer heat away which is kind of it's secondary or in some instances primary goal so yeah to admit that i think it's a little bit weird anyway i'm going to stop moaning we'll stop the video now and we'll be back shortly okay so i've actually remedied the problem and this is the the finished article i did actually remove the old drive which was the uh the xpg one which is this one it just simply wasn't gonna fit in there and without taking off this metal enclosure or the metal kind of top piece it wasn't going to fit so i went with another drive which i had which actually does need to go into a computer this is just a bare drive and actually it fitted in pretty nicely hopefully it's going to focus on that but anyway so that is the slot that we're going to be installing it into this pci express time 16 slot at the bottom it is only wired for eight in this particular one so we're not going to need to take off anything from the back here it's going to be absolutely fine so i'm going to turn the pc off and then insert it and we'll see what it looks like when it's lit up so it's going to press down on the retention arm there just to hold hold it in place shortly line it up in there stick it in and that's it locked into position that was it super super fast so let's turn the pc back on i'll be interested to see if we actually get any illumination on those leds on the side where that sabrin logo is there we go that looks pretty nice actually pretty uh pretty discreet despite my misgivings about the actual installation process it does look pretty nice in there and there we go so we're actually transferring some data now across the drive and it's actually lighting up blue there's four blue leds on there to show disk activity it would appear and we're currently transferring in the system at somewhere in the region of about about one gigabyte per second across that pci express gen 3 bus although the lights don't exactly look like they're changing in relation to what windows is actually doing so currently we're down slightly slower speed 800 megabytes per second because there's some slightly smaller files back up to one gig per second and the lights don't seem to be doing actually anything else so i'm not entirely sure whether there's four lights on there whether that's saying it is pci express gen 3 times 4 is using a times 4 bandwidth i don't know not entirely sure i don't have a slot which actually has less than times 4 on it so impossible to tell there we go it's actually finished transferring now yeah there we go okay so we're back and it's actually the next day now i've done a load of footage which i'm not gonna bore you with because the results are pretty weird so let's just wrap things up this is a really hard thing to install and to actually get right first time so i went through a few different variations with different drives so we went with the silicon powered two terabyte one which is what i would consider a normal modern drive so just has a label on it and that is it also with the xpg which uh did manage to get to fit but not particularly well the real takeaway of this is those thermal pads now depending on your drive setup and how you actually install it etc etc your results may be drastically different now i did one test and ended up with the actual drive being about 12 degrees hotter than the other drive in the system which was underneath the frozen slot in the pc behind me so this is really not a good thing if you've spent 15 pounds on a drive enclosure or mounting kit and for it to actually be hotter than it would be in normal open air obviously something has gone very wrong so the thermal pad is not making contact it's not transferring heat to the outside edge and it's not getting cooled so this is worst case scenario and in a lot of cases will give you worse performance than it would just a bear drive on its own so in that respect i can't wholeheartedly recommend this because of the complexity of actually getting those pads right you may even need to use things like some sort of measuring device to actually see what the gaps are between the various components you may even need to replace the screws so you can get all three of the pads actually installed at the same time in order to get the cooling absolutely right now obviously when drives report the temperatures back to the system there's a kind of like an overall picture of the actual temperature this isn't going to give you any idea of certain hot spots on particular chips if they're not being covered or not being correctly applied with that thermal pad so it is a little bit risky especially if you've got a particularly expensive drive which you basically don't want to die prematurely so i would say for most people this is going to be fine if you're going to keep this in your kind of kickback for an emergency purposes if you need to transfer some data and someone hasn't got an available slot just to put it in as a bare drive without the actual enclosure around the outside it works absolutely fine and temperatures are probably only about three or four degrees more than a regular drive underneath one of those photo slots or a built-in m.2 shield that kind of thing so for kind of yeah engineers and techies that kind of stuff you just want to transfer some data and need a quick and easy way of doing it this is definitely an option although there are obviously other options such as the usb 1 which ugly bob kindly provided us with which you can check out up here and also we did one from easy doi as well which is a pci express version which doesn't have a cooling method but certainly it's considerably easier to actually set up the drives etc etc so yeah mixed results when it actually does work properly which i have actually managed to get it to work properly with a single thick thermal pad on the drive and actually the temperatures are about three or four degrees lower than the actual frozen one in the system which again is like a cooling solution so it's not brilliant at cooling and again your results may vary 15 pounds for some of you maybe a little bit too much money to kind of just waste on something which you're going to just keep in your kit bag for that opportune moment where you may actually need it if you like the look of it and the design of it and you're prepared to actually work with it and check all your temperatures et cetera and experiment with different thermal pad sizes then yeah definitely go for it it's a reasonable price anyway that has been my experiences with it please do let me know your experiences in the comments section below and let me know what you think if you think i've done anything wrong in my testing methodology or do you just think that really they need to look at this a bit better and maybe experiment more with throne pads and actually give you some direction of how to use it let me know what you think i'll be interested to know but that's gonna wrap this one up i've been mike this is mike's unboxing reviews and how to and hopefully we'll catch you in the very next video thanks for watching

Channel: Mike's unboxing, reviews and how to

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Id: N6gg145o9ZE

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022