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Due to a motherboard short, I’m concerned about the health of my SSD. I want to read the contents of the SSD via an SATA-USB adapter on my laptop. I have already verified my mechanical hard disk drives with this method. However, I’ve never tried to connect an SSD to the adapter.

Modularity and abstraction via the SSD controller probably means that it is safe to do so, but I want to verify it here nonetheless: Is it safe to connect an SSD to a PC via an SATA-USB adapter or are there potential side effects in doing so?

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  • If it fits and the drivers are OK and the disk gets enough power you should be fine.
    – x13
    Oct 4, 2015 at 19:46
  • There are no potential side effects that I have ever heard of and it should be perfectly safe to connect the SSD to a SATA to USB adapter. I would however test he USB to SATA adapter with a different drive first if possible. Oct 9, 2015 at 7:40

2 Answers 2

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Is it safe? Of course. Will it perform well? No. But for backing up files, yes, it is just fine. Other downsides to USB to SATA bridges tend to be lack of the ability to get SMART health reporting, proper error messages when things go wrong, and functioning TRIM.

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  • Some controllers/docks/adapters support passing SMART, although it's possible that Windows might not support reading it from the USB adapter.
    – nanofarad
    Oct 5, 2015 at 0:26
  • @hexafraction, apparently there are a few usb bridges that work with SMART, but it seems that most don't.
    – psusi
    Oct 5, 2015 at 2:01
  • @hexafraction I've been using an external USB drive on Windows XP and have never had a problem reading the SMART data. It's an IDE drive, but I don't see why SATA would be different in terms of getting the SMART data. Sep 6, 2016 at 20:00
  • @pacoverflow, SATA isn't any different. The issue is that SMART is part of the ATA command set, and USB drives speak the SCSI Reduced Block command set instead of the ATA command set, which has no concept of SMART. Some bridges have a proprietary extension for passing ATA commands through to the drive, but it requires special software support and not all bridges can do this.
    – psusi
    Oct 7, 2016 at 17:54
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Yes it’s fine as I have did it many times, SATA is even hot swappable 99% of the time, even with laptops and this is with USB or SATA controllers.

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    If you want it hot-swappable, you probably want write caching turned off.
    – fixer1234
    Oct 4, 2015 at 20:18
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    Do I care about this hot swappability requirement if I simply hook up the drive to the adapter, hook the adapter to main power, then hook the USB connector to my laptop. After I'm done with backing up files, right click on the "remove drive" icon in Win7, then remove the USB connector, and lastly remove the main power? Oct 4, 2015 at 20:27
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    @fixer1234, only if you plan on stupidly yanking it out without first unmounting it. Unmount it first, and the write cache is just fine.
    – psusi
    Oct 4, 2015 at 20:55
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    @psusi: Exactly. Any USB drive is hot-swappable in the sense of not having to power down. I just didn't want someone to see that and think it meant they could just yank the drive.
    – fixer1234
    Oct 4, 2015 at 21:34
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    @WuschelbeutelKartoffelhuhn: Hot swappable means being able to remove and connect drives without powering down, but people sometimes think of it in terms of being able to connect and disconnect at will, and that's what I was referring to. If you want to be able to just yank a drive as long as it isn't actively transferring data, you would need to disable write caching to avoid corruption. Write caching is typically enabled by default, in which case any cached content needs to be written before the drive is removed. Using the eject or remove drive icon does that. So you're doing it right.
    – fixer1234
    Oct 4, 2015 at 21:51

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