Nvme to usb enclosures can work great, but can also be dodgy to work with. I personally find SATA enclosures more reliable overall, as they are less demanding
There are a few issues at play:
1. Power supply issues: the power demands of your mix of enclosure and drive may not be satisfied by your USB port(s), which can vary wildly in capability, and over time.
2. The controller within the enclosure can overheat under load. This seems to happen across many enclosures I’ve tried. Larger enclosures may allow for attaching a tiny heatsink.
3. NVMe drives may not gracefully handle sudden disconnections. USB connections are inherently unreliable interfaces prone to physical disruption and loss of power, which will multiply against any normally hidden non-resiliance in the nvme drive.
If your drive decides to stop showing up, first try loading up the boot device selection screen in the UEFI, and then insert the drive. It may take several seconds to show up. If trying that a few times doesn’t work, the drive may be stuck in some kind of bad state. You may be able to recover from this with the unfortunately poorly known power cycle technique https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
The technique summarized is:
1. Connect to power (not data) only. Alternatively letting the drive sit at bios setup screen also seems to work. Turn on the power and leave the power on for 30 minutes.
2. After 30 minutes, power down or pull the power cable.
3. Wait 30 seconds, then restore power.
4. Let the drive sit powered on for another 30 minutes.
5. Power down again, then wait 30 seconds.
Always set up automatic backups if you actually have non-replaceable data on the drive. They can and will just suddenly die forever with loss of all data, just like thumb drives. You have been warned.
All that said, there are generally less issues if you are simply putting ventoy on it to just install an OS from an iso.
I have a dual raid1 sata enclosure that I use to boot a windows to go install created with Rufus (https://github.com/pbatard/rufus), which makes testing and benchmarking so much nicer to deal with. I’ve even stuck games on it, and other than relative filesystem slowness it works pretty great, once I added a heatsink to the enclosure controller.
There are a few issues at play:
1. Power supply issues: the power demands of your mix of enclosure and drive may not be satisfied by your USB port(s), which can vary wildly in capability, and over time.
2. The controller within the enclosure can overheat under load. This seems to happen across many enclosures I’ve tried. Larger enclosures may allow for attaching a tiny heatsink.
3. NVMe drives may not gracefully handle sudden disconnections. USB connections are inherently unreliable interfaces prone to physical disruption and loss of power, which will multiply against any normally hidden non-resiliance in the nvme drive.
If your drive decides to stop showing up, first try loading up the boot device selection screen in the UEFI, and then insert the drive. It may take several seconds to show up. If trying that a few times doesn’t work, the drive may be stuck in some kind of bad state. You may be able to recover from this with the unfortunately poorly known power cycle technique https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
The technique summarized is:
1. Connect to power (not data) only. Alternatively letting the drive sit at bios setup screen also seems to work. Turn on the power and leave the power on for 30 minutes.
2. After 30 minutes, power down or pull the power cable.
3. Wait 30 seconds, then restore power.
4. Let the drive sit powered on for another 30 minutes.
5. Power down again, then wait 30 seconds.
Always set up automatic backups if you actually have non-replaceable data on the drive. They can and will just suddenly die forever with loss of all data, just like thumb drives. You have been warned.
All that said, there are generally less issues if you are simply putting ventoy on it to just install an OS from an iso.
I have a dual raid1 sata enclosure that I use to boot a windows to go install created with Rufus (https://github.com/pbatard/rufus), which makes testing and benchmarking so much nicer to deal with. I’ve even stuck games on it, and other than relative filesystem slowness it works pretty great, once I added a heatsink to the enclosure controller.