First experience with NVMe M.2 in enclosure - bad.

[Ben Jenssen]

I thought I'd try to give my little M1 Mini a little 'upgrade' by adding a really fast external 2TB drive to complement the internal 512BG. It would replace the 2TB 2.5" in USB-C enclosure that I have now, which has a r/w speed of just under 400MB/s. True Thunderbolt drive enclosures give transfer speeds up to 1550MB/s. You can find many more SSD enclosures that say "Thunderbolt compatible" but notice they are cheaper, and that's because they are not thunderbolt 3, they are USB.

I bought this:

Kingston NV1 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Internal SSD

And this:
ORICO Thunderbolt3 M.2 NVMe SSD kabinett
(Sorry, Norwegian page. I can't find much onfo elsewhere. Might be a clue.)

I'll try to make this short.
The assembly was easy. I plugged it in and immediately mesured the r/w speed to about 1500/1200 MB/s. OK.

So I played around a bit, everything was fine, and I started a copying of a 800GB folder in Finder. It stopped about half-way and gave a error about not being properly unmounted, just like if you pulled the cable.

Since then, I've tried anything I can think of:
Different ports.
Different cables.
Different format (APFS/HFS+).
Different partitioning.
Unplugging everything else.
+++

The drive will always fail in a similar way;
I copy things, at once or in increments, when I reach between 4-600GB it ejects, and I get the unmount warning. Then, it's a struggle to format it again, because if not it will self eject whenever you get it to show.

When I manage to reformat it, it seems to work perfectly, I can partition it in Disk Utilities, copy files, anything. Until that moment when it's about 30% full - then it ejects and is unuseful until reformated.

Must be said also that this is very unusual behavior. Disk Utilities can go into a spinning wheel freeze f.ex. Often, if I have had this breakdown of the drive, restart will take much longer than usual, and I will get a "blip" mac system sound when desktop appears, but without any alert or anything.

I'm guessing this is the enclosure, so I'm returning it. I'll keep the 2TB blade and see if I can put it somewhere else. Would've been nice to have a combined dock/enclosure, but they seem very expensive.

Any recommendations appreciated.

[LoudBassTone]

Amazon reviews in USA are 37% 1 star, claiming random dismounting and overheating for Orico case. In the US I usually look to OWC.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by LoudBassTone

Amazon reviews in USA are 37% 1 star, claiming random dismounting and overheating for Orico case. In the US I usually look to OWC.

Thanks. I didn't catch that.
I ordered this last night:
OWC Envoy Express

[Ben Jenssen]

Another thing; the way this Orico enclosure fails, I think of those poor people who will use it and add data to it much more slowly than I did. They will not see the problem until maybe months later, and in a second - drive is a brick, and all data gone.

[Sugarnutz]

I have one of these that works well on my 2015 rMBP and even better on my i9 PC with Thunderbolt 3, comes with both cables.

SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure

Ordered this on today for my sample libraries on the rMBP that I just got PT 2022.7 on along with a new WD 1TB NVMe drive.

SSK Aluminum USB C to M.2 NVMe SSD Tool-Free Enclosure Reader

I’ve got another one of the SSK enclosures for a 512Gb M.2 SATA drive I’ve been using without issue.

I would suggest the 1st link at the top because it comes with thermal material, not sure about the 2nd as someone said the 2nd linked item just relied on drive to housing and getting very hot.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by Sugarnutz

I have one of these that works well on my 2015 rMBP and even better on my i9 PC with Thunderbolt 3, comes with both cables.

SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure

Ordered this on today for my sample libraries on the rMBP that I just got PT 2022.7 on along with a new WD 1TB NVMe drive.

SSK Aluminum USB C to M.2 NVMe SSD Tool-Free Enclosure Reader

I’ve got another one of the SSK enclosures for a 512Gb M.2 SATA drive I’ve been using without issue.

I would suggest the 1st link at the top because it comes with thermal material, not sure about the 2nd as someone said the 2nd linked item just relied on drive to housing and getting very hot.

I'm talking about true Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. Some say they're 'Thunderbolt 3 compatible' but they are limited in speed. Price difference is also very noticeable.
Speed difference is up to 4:1 in my experience, in favour of thunderbolt vs pci-e sata.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Sugarnutz

I have one of these that works well on my 2015 rMBP and even better on my i9 PC with Thunderbolt 3, comes with both cables.

SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure

Ordered this on today for my sample libraries on the rMBP that I just got PT 2022.7 on along with a new WD 1TB NVMe drive.

SSK Aluminum USB C to M.2 NVMe SSD Tool-Free Enclosure Reader

I’ve got another one of the SSK enclosures for a 512Gb M.2 SATA drive I’ve been using without issue.

I would suggest the 1st link at the top because it comes with thermal material, not sure about the 2nd as someone said the 2nd linked item just relied on drive to housing and getting very hot.

As Ben points out these are all USB enclosures and will run slower than a Thunderbolt enclosure.

--

All these small passively cooled enclosures may show thermal throttling effects if you are throwing sustained workloads at them, but then most Pro Tools users don't do that so these may never suffer from that.

OTOH if you are on Mac and want the lowest cost way of getting access to fast SSD performance a single modern M.2 drive in a single slot carrier on a Thunderbolt 3/4 bus is a good choice. I go a different route with multiple M.2 cards in a PCIe expansion chassis, better sustained cooling and have too many M.2 drives and too few Thunderbolt busses.

[spinsong]

PCI vs pcie could mean something very pricey as some of you older pci card adapters might know. What would you rather have more bark or more bite. I prefer good sound over a bite in my pocket. Look at it from a price perspective. Look up nvme archival and look at the price tags. 17,000.00 for some hard drives. It’s viable from a performance standpoint, but not practical if you decide to look further down the road. Heating issues, amongst countless failures. Don’t expect to get Maserati speeds without paying the price. My land yacht gets me where I need to go, and it’s reliable. Flick the switch, and it just works, just as in years past. Speeds are also in par with the rest. I don’t need blazing speeds and overheating to run audio. Whatever floats your boat.
What’s the point of the whole rant. If you want to go cutting edge expect to pay the price over longevity. Pcie are a thing of the past. Go ssd and hard drives. Even computer manufacturers have cut the cord. To add fuel to the mix, pcie is intel based technology if I’m not mistaken, it’s possible it’s not compatible with the new chips without using Rosetta 2.

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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

PCI vs pcie could mean something very pricey as some of you older pci card adapters might know. What would you rather have more bark or more bite. I prefer good sound over a bite in my pocket. Look at it from a price perspective. Look up nvme archival and look at the price tags. 17,000.00 for some hard drives. It’s viable from a performance standpoint, but not practical if you decide to look further down the road. Heating issues, amongst countless failures. Don’t expect to get Maserati speeds without paying the price. My land yacht gets me where I need to go, and it’s reliable. Flick the switch, and it just works, just as in years past. Speeds are also in par with the rest. I don’t need blazing speeds and overheating to run audio. Whatever floats your boat.
What’s the point of the whole rant. If you want to go cutting edge expect to pay the price over longevity. Pcie are a thing of the past. Go ssd and hard drives. Even computer manufacturers have cut the cord. To add fuel to the mix, pcie is intel based technology if I’m not mistaken, it’s possible it’s not compatible with the new chips without using Rosetta 2.

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What a pile of confused incoherent and technically wrong waffle. Why you need to keep posting stuff like this when you clearly don't have any clue what you are talking about is beyond me.

No PCIe is not "a thing of the past" just what are you talking about? No PCIe is not Intel technology. Not one computer manufacturer has "cut the cord". All modern computers are built around PCIe, including the new Apple Silicon Macs, they rely heavily on PCIe internally, and most SSDs used in modern computers... PCIe based.

PCIe has no relation to Rosetta 2. Every Apple silicon Mac uses PCIe extensively... and uh they work fine without Rosetta 2.

Oh and you want to claim HDD are more reliable than SSDs. Just no. Yes HDD are good for archival, arguably better than SSD, but better as an operational drive hell no. More reliable, much faster, more compact, and becoming effectively cheaper than HDD for many uses.

Your lack of any technical understandings in your "technical" posts is just staggering.

[spinsong]

What if they try to pull a fast one with pcie. They did it with pci in the past leaving those cards hard to upgrade without a chassis. Fool me once. They could always come up with some other jalopy and call it quits. What do you expect after Ventura; after they might do away with intel support all together. There’s a strong possibility that these pcie cards are running off intel or intel related chips. Obviously there’s an incompatibility between intel and the new chips. We’re talking outside the box not the inner workings and/ or similarities.
Another argument is, if the inside of the new macs are pcie, why can’t you get to it.
Why don’t you face it. The connectors are obsolete; just like like the chassis’ you’re trying to connect them to.
They did away with it alongside the 2013 macs
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