Hey everyone! I'm new here and could use some help figuring out if my recent purchase of an external hard drive is a scam or just a case of me being confused about hard drive technologies. I recently bought a 2TB external drive for about €40, claiming to support USB 2.0/3.0. However, upon receiving it, the packaging mentioned terms like 'Portable SSD' and 'M.2 SSD,' which raised some red flags for me.
When I checked it on my Windows PC, it showed different types of devices in various tools—sometimes indicating it's a hard drive and other times as an SSD. The performance when transferring files was also quite slow, fluctuating between 7 and 10 MB/s for a 10GB transfer, which seems off to me. My laptop has USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, so the speed should at least align with that.
I can hear what sounds like a disk inside, so I'm mostly convinced it's an HDD. But I'm wondering how to verify what type of drive I actually have and what might be causing the slow transfer speeds. Any insights would be hugely appreciated!
1 Answer
The SHL-R320 is actually an enclosure, meaning you can open it up to see what's inside. If you have a portable SSD, you probably won't hear a spinning disk inside. This enclosure supports SATA and NVMe drives, so if you're super lucky, you might have a cheap SATA SSD instead!
Well, I bought this specific drive: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0F8Q5D2NT?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title. It's not the one you linked.