I have a Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD SNV3S2000G (2TB) in an IcyBox IB-1817Ma-C31, both bought this year (2025).
The intention was to use the external device as backup medium for my ThinkPad laptop running Windows 11 Pro.
The connection is via a 10Gbps SuperSpeed (SS) USB3 connector using a Thunderbolt 4 cable usually (sometimnes I used the short cable shipped with the USB case).
Power consumption is between 0W (idle) and 2W (active) according to the cable’s built-in display.
While it seemed to work nicely, I recently saw data corruption in files and in the NTFS filesystem that I cannot explain.
Checking the S.M.A.R.T. data in Linux with smartctl showed no real issues, but I’m not sure the tool and the USB bridge cooperate nicely.
So I ran h2testw on a different computer using a powered USB3 hub.
The device is handled as UAS device (uaspstor.sys) in Windows 10.
As the test would run for more than 7 hours, I aborted writing after about 1.3TB.
When test-reading the data, I got this result:
Warning: Only 1348197 of 1903616 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
1.2 TByte OK (2761077760 sectors)
14.5 MByte DATA LOST (29696 sectors)
Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
14.5 MByte corrupted (29696 sectors)
0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x00000000c0000000
Expected: 0x00000000c0000000
Found: 0x0000000000000000
H2testw version 1.3
Reading speed: 316 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
In contrast to recommendation I did not test a single partition covering the whole device, but instead tested the large partition with the problem (because the device has a bootable recovery system on another partition).
In (German) diskpart is looks like this:
DISKPART> list part
Partition ### Typ Größe Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Reserviert 15 MB 17 KB
Partition 2 System 4096 MB 16 MB
Partition 3 Primär 1859 GB 4112 MB
The first two partitions are hidden; only the third one has a drive letter assigned.
However I’m not quite sure what this means:
- Is there a compatibility problem with the SSD case and the SSD being used?
- Is there a defect in the IcyBox SSD case?
- Is there a defect in the Kingston SSD?
- Is the a defect in the laptop or Windows 10/11?
I would have warranty on both external parts as well as on the laptop.
Examining the Windows 11 event logs on the laptop I only saw come correctable PCI express errors that I cannot assign to any specific hardware.
On the testing machine running Windows 10 I did not see such errors.
