It’s worth mentioning that Apple’s M1 Mac range has an underlying issue due to which, your external SSD will not receive it’s maximum speed. I am all for tool-free installations, and this enclosure does not disappoint in this regard. The setup is a breeze, involving just plugging the SSD into the M.2 NVMe USB adapter and securing it with a rubber plug. This is why it’s in the third position in our list of best M.2 SSD enclosures. The last enclosure I bought was the TDBT M.2 NVMe enclosure. Like the Shinestar this also uses the JMS583, and despite the inclusion of a larger case, and a heat spreader with thermal pad, it runs slightly hotter than the Tripp-lite unit, but not uncomfortably so. I assume the heat spreader is doing its job and spreading the heat, and the larger enclosure has more surface area to absorb/dissipate heat. Welcome to the cutting edge! You're shopping for a kind of drive that many folks don't even realize exists. As a result, you need to pay attention to several factors that may not be documented very well while you shop. Let's recap. The fastest SSD enclosures in the consumer market currently operate at 40 Gbps of bandwidth over USB4 or Thunderbolt. They tend to target Mac users since this is the only platform where 40 Gbps USB ports are widely available. However, a small but increasing amount of high-end PC motherboards and laptops come with USB4 connectivity.

The earliest versions of M.2 PCI Express SSDs made use of the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x2 interface, which defines a throughput ceiling that's higher than SATA 3.0's, but not enormously so. That evolved into PCI Express Gen 3.0 x2 and x4, paired with a technology called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) to propel performance even further, especially with heavy, deeply queued workloads. It is plug-and-play supported. However, you would need a screwdriver to install your drive inside it. You also get an LED indicator. Designed to accommodate M and B&M keys along with a broad spectrum of SSD sizes ranging from 2230 to 2280, it offers a home for SSDs with capacities of up to 8TB. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.This one is perfect if you have two drives and do not want to use two different enclosures. Don’t worry, it works perfectly with a single drive as well. However, this only supports the M.2 NVMe SSDs, not M.2 SATA SSDs. An RGB M.2 gaming enclosure that is compatible with many devices. This exceptional enclosure is compatible with most PCIe M.2 SSD SSDs up to 80mm in length. This enclosure is compatible with many gaming platforms, including PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. It also has a USB Type-C Gen 2 port that can be used at high speed. As evidenced by the CrystalDiskMark sequential performance chart, any decent M.2 enclosure will max out its interface bandwidth when connected to a sufficiently fast USB port. This also means that an external PCIe/NVMe SSD in a 10 Gbps enclosure is about twice as fast even when compared to high-end internal SATA drives.

The ultrafast performance that this enclosure guarantees stems from its USB-C 3.2 Gen 2×1 interface that supports transfer speeds reaching up to 10 Gbps. When I look at the military-grade toughness, it translates to a robust build quality, fulfilling the MIL-STD-810H standards for drop resistance, alongside boasting an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance. This promises enhanced durability, potentially making the enclosure a long-lasting companion for users, safeguarding the housed SSD from common environmental adversities.

Accessories

The all-aluminum chassis has ridges to help with heat dissipation and it comes with both a thermal pad you can put on top of your SSD to keep it cool under prolonged loads. It’s a rather attractive silver enclosure that has a small cutout / handle area you can use for threading through a carabiner. On a few M.2 enclosures, including the SSK SHE-C325, we found that our test Kingston Rage Fury SSD’s built-in graphene heat spreader, which adds 3.5mm of z height to the drive, didn’t leave much vertical clearance. However, the SHE-C325 could close anyway, without scraping the drive’s surface. Considering that many M.2 SSDs have built-in, non-removable heat spreaders, every enclosure should accommodate them. At the core, an SSD is just a thin circuit board studded with flash-memory and controller chips. Why not design around that? Thus the M.2 form factor was born. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The Sabrent (EC-SNVE) is cheap and support both M.2 SATA and M.2 NVMe SSDs. It comes with 100% tool-free installation so that you can easily install or remove your SSD on the go.

Almost any PCIe 3.0 (Gen3) or newer M.2 SSD should be able to saturate 10 Gbps or even 20 Gbps worth of USB bandwidth. For this reason, it makes a lot of sense to use an entry-level or midrange SSD for an external enclosure. Using a high-end drive means that much of its performance is left on the table. One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's"Optane SSDs"were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.) The Orico’s M2PV-C3’s design is less polarizing than that of the SSK SHE-C325, but it actually uses cheaper materials, as the top panel is ridged aluminum but the sides and bottom are ABS plastic. I've got a Shinestar NVMe enclosure, but it tops out around 1GB and I know these drives go faster when plugged directly into an M2 slot. South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's ForI also have a couple Orico drives with fans, but those are just overkill and mostly for show. They do work, just big and require tools to swap drives. Know which bus you're on.In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. The broad compatibility of the UGREEN M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure caught my eye, supporting NMVe protocol M and B&M Keys and accommodating SSD sizes ranging from 2230 to 2280, with a maximum capacity of 8TB. It is supported with Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS operating systems.

Installing an SSD is pretty easy as you just need to unscrew the cover, attach the M.2 drive along with the optional cooling pad, screw in the mounting screw and reattach the cover. Unfortunately, both the cover and the mounting screw are 5-point star shaped screws, which are not very common. However, there’s a screwdriver in the box. Just a while ago I shared a tutorial about building your own external SSD and how easy it is to do so. All you need is an internal SSD along with a compatible NVMe enclosure. Fix the SSD into the enclosure and you are done. It’s that simple, really. In terms of performance, the Asus enclosure is on par with other 10 Gbps models, but the main selling point here is design – especially the Strix Owl RGB highlights. The aluminum alloy casing of the enclosure does an outstanding job of dissipating heat and maintaining performance. Generally if the drive is readable I'll boot off a custom WinPE disk I built and run USMT to salvage the user profile data to a compressed MIG store. Then I'll replace the drive or laptop, re-image, and restore the salvaged profile. So the faster the drive is the faster I can complete these tasks. Which makes users happier. I've been using a M2 Sata enclosure, but I also have 2.5" external cables that let me plug a 2.5" directly into a USB port.However, from an engineering point of view, SSDs didn't needto be that big. The enclosure an SSD comes in has a lot of dead space inside. It's designed in that 2.5-inch size and shape to make the drive fit into those existing bays. So when mobile-device designers, challenged with slimming down laptops and tablets, reassessed this issue, the consensus was clear: The bulky 2.5-inch form factor, eventually, would have to go. Next is the fastest USB thumb drive I own. These predate me having the USB External M2 adapters. So I used to use them for salvage. Most of the time now they run various bootable things. But the read/write speeds are still impressive for a true USB Thumb drive. Sandisk Extreme 64GB (CZ80) This enclosure is also the fastest of the bunch, but only by about 15-20MB/s pure sequential with large files. To see how each SSD and hard drive enclosure performs, we installed an SSD, connected the enclosure to our testbed laptop (a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 10th Gen) and then ran a series of benchmark tests, using three different apps: PCMark 10’s Storage Benchmark, DiskBench and CrystalDiskMark 8. To maintain consistency, we used the same M.2 NVMe SSD, a Kingston Rage Fury PCIe 4.0 SSD (2TB), in all of our M.2 enclosures and the same 2.5-inch SATA SSD (a 1.9TB Toshiba model) in all of our 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA enclosures.