Since I have a fair few 750GB disks sat doing nothing, I figured I’d get some USB3 caddies for them. Back when USB -> IDE caddies appeared, they were hideously expensive. Not so much these days!
For £6 on eBay, you get a basic plastic box with the required bridge circuitry.
Here’s the PCB – a very basic affair, with only 2 ICs. The large QFN IC on the left is the USB-SATA bridge. It’s a JMicron JMS567. Unfortunately JMicron are rather secretive about their bridge chips & I can’t find much information about it, nor a datasheet.
Here’s the other side of the bridge PCB – not much on here, the activity indicator LED is a bit of a bodge job, but it’s functional. The IC on the right is a Pm25LD512 512Kbit SPI EEPROM. This is used to store things like the USB device & vendor IDs, device name, type, etc. Here’s what dmesg spits out when the disk is connected on my standard Linux system:
[10397.893298] usb 2-3.1.1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd [10397.909019] usb 2-3.1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=1562 [10397.909025] usb 2-3.1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [10397.909027] usb 2-3.1.1: Product: ELEMENTS [10397.909028] usb 2-3.1.1: Manufacturer: ELEMENTS [10397.909029] usb 2-3.1.1: SerialNumber: 0F00000000157DC [10397.912679] scsi host13: uas [10397.913198] scsi 13:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD ELEMENTS 0225 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 [10397.914043] sd 13:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg11 type 0 [10397.914179] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] Spinning up disk... [10398.917575] .....ready [10402.939800] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] 1465149168 512-byte logical blocks: (750 GB/698 GiB) [10402.939803] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] 4096-byte physical blocks [10402.940358] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] Write Protect is off [10402.940363] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] Mode Sense: 53 00 00 08 [10402.940662] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [10403.038847] sdk: sdk1 [10403.040572] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdk] Attached SCSI disk [10404.347605] device-mapper: table: 252:0: adding target device sdk1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=4096 [10404.347611] device-mapper: table: 252:0: adding target device sdk1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=4096 [10404.626320] device-mapper: table: 252:0: adding target device sdk1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=2100224 [10404.626325] device-mapper: table: 252:0: adding target device sdk1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=2100224
Here’s some speed benchmarks:
First attached to a USB2 port, above
And finally attached to a USB3 port, above
Tests were done with a 320GB 5400RPM Samsung HM321HI drive, direct into the root hub, for the shortest possible signal length.
