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I Usually prefer to keep my USB flash drive plugged in all the time and got no problem with it.

But this time I am planning to get a new portable ssd for bigger capacity.

This is what it looks like as shown below.

the picture of the item

It looks like a plain usb pen drive, but it is actually portable ssd in pen drive form factor. It has 450mb/s for reading and 400mb/s for writing. Although the speed is a bit slower than mainstream internal sata 3 drive, it is quite good performance considering it is usb3.0 interface, and it is totally cable-free, so hassle-free. Big plus.

My concern here is whether it would be OK to keep it plugged in all the time while pc is on, mainly because I would use it as backup drive to save all the data(movies, text files, mp3 etc) and read those from right there so that I don't need to care about backups every time I decide to clean install a new OS and format my main drive.(all the application required to open these files are installed in the main drive of course).

TL DR; A few questions related to what I am trying to do..

  1. Does operating system keep reading/writing to external drive where os is not installed, other than when I use it to read or copy something to that drive? like system checking or whatevery you call it.

  2. Is it ok to leave it connected to main pc hardware-wise? (heat problem, dust, unnecessary workload etc)

  3. Does cableless external ssd have any benefit over traditional cabled external ssd in any way other than the portability? (for instance faster response due to shortened length the data is transmitted in.)

Thank you!

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2 Answers 2

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Question 1

I think that Windows does do some stuff which is why you have to eject the drive (only while formatted with NTFS). The write/read won't increase or decrease at all though. Also that would happen with any hard drive though.

Question 2

The only thing that I would be worried about there is just heat. The dust won't be a problem because it has no fans or ventilation. Unnecessary workload was addressed in Question 1. At first, I would just make sure that the drive isn't getting to hot, and if it gets to hot you can get a USB extension cable that allows you to move the drive to someplace where it won't get as hot.

Question 3

I do not see any why that would be better than portability. You are not going to get noticeable faster response times, as it takes miles of cable for you to be able to notice the delay.

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  • Thanks for your reply. I am planning to connect it to usb hub which already has a cable long enough to get distant from the heat source, so I guess it would be ok. And about the "do some stuff" won't it damage my write p/e cycles and ssd lifespan?
    – takfa
    Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 1:42
  • @takfa by 'do some stuff' I mean something similar to write caching where it won't write to the drive until the activity on the drive is lower. I don't think that windows actually does any extra reads or writes. Sorry for not being specific in the answer i wrote that at like 11:30 at night :)
    – bobsfriend12
    Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 15:13
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  1. The recycle bin reads all drives when you show it or empty it but not if you delete a file on another drive. Otherwise Windows doesn't touch unless you have something configured to - eg a backup program.

  2. If heat is a problem for your drive then its a problem for your computer. So probably not.

  3. USB is serial. In simple theory parallel should be faster sending multiple bits at the same time. But in practise they all interfere with each other's magnetic fields - the longer the wire the more interference. For serial it doesn't matter at the lengths you are talking about.

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  • thank you for the information, It helped me decide what to buy :)
    – takfa
    Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 2:34

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