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

[Righty27]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I think he is talking about the Samsung 970 Evo (maybe Evo Plus) M.2 drives on a Syba card... one of the switch based cards I've been recommending.

Thanks Darryl - this drive is probably better suited/value to the Sonnet dock as the extra performance of the 980 Pro or WD_Black SN850 would be wasted considering the restricted bandwidth due to the lack of PCIe switch, which you explained earlier. However, the newer SSD models could maybe later be moved to a higher-performing chassis + avoids the firmware issue that Sonnet mention for the 970 EVO Plus, especially as Samsung don't appear to have a management tool for Macs. I also wonder if using the faster drives well within their performance capability might help them run cooler - not seen any tests on this specifically but thinking may be worth spending a bit extra?!

Originally Posted by glasswing

Andy at Sonnet recommended the 970 Evo Plus. I suspect they're working fine. I'm not sure when they shipped! That could be another zit I'll research after the 19th - depending on the outcome of other hopeful fixes.
Why do you leave your stuff on all the time? I used to do that but power outages here (an island off the left coast of Canada) and electric bills encouraged me to sleep or shut down.
THanks!!!

Andy has been very helpful and patient with me! Your drives probably arrived with the Mac-compatible firmware, although worth highlighting the issue in case anyone else arrives at this thread doing similar investigations. Apologies - by 'on', I meant I allow the desktop Mac, which is backed-up by a decent APC online UPS, to sleep/wake during the day, and typically shut down each evening or after a few days at most (MacBook might go much longer without a restart) ... which is why I was drilling-down into the sleep/wake disconnect/re-mount issue (or non-issue as it turns out!) :)

[Ben Jenssen]

I got the OWC Envoy express today, and had exactly the same experience as with the other enclosure I tried. Everything works fine copying, reading, speed testing, until I get to about 25-30% occupied space; the disk and its volumes ejects, gives the eject error alert, and is difficult to reformat because it will self-eject very quickly after showing up in Finder.

So, I assume it's my Kingston 2TB NVMe M2 SSD that is at fault. I'll try to get them to replace it or give me my money back.

The OWC enclosure was significantly cooler BTW, but also a little bit slower. 1300/1000MB/s read/write speed, vs 1500/1300 on the other one I tried.

[GoButtonGuy]

I’ve been using this for several weeks now…

Case, active cooling Thumderbolt 3
https://fledging.tech/products/shell-thunder

SK hynix Platinum P41
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...p41-ssd-review

It Blackmagic speed tests consistently at 2500 MBps or so consistently. In use it’s plenty fast. Big improvement over my EVO850 in an OWC barebones USB 3 case.

[Righty27]

Originally Posted by GoButtonGuy

I’ve been using this for several weeks now…

Case, active cooling Thumderbolt 3
https://fledging.tech/products/shell-thunder

SK hynix Platinum P41
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...p41-ssd-review

It Blackmagic speed tests consistently at 2500 MBps or so consistently. In use it’s plenty fast. Big improvement over my EVO850 in an OWC barebones USB 3 case.

How’s the Fledging enclosure working for you + with what computer (e.g. Intel or M1/M2 Mac)? Any reliability issues, for example? Is the fan/cooling noisy/constant or only active with heavy loads … does the case get hot?

[GoButtonGuy]

Originally Posted by Righty27

How’s the Fledging enclosure working for you + with what computer (e.g. Intel or M1/M2 Mac)? Any reliability issues, for example? Is the fan/cooling noisy/constant or only active with heavy loads … does the case get hot?

The case is working well. I haven’t heard any discernible noise from it and it runs at room temp. The bottom of the MBP is much warmer though if I’m working in my place I bought a Svault cooling block (the block is a bit spendy but works well and looks good). The primary machine it’s used on is an M1 Pro Macbook Pro. I formatted it APFS so I’m not able to take it a Windows box directly unless it has Paragon or Mac Drive (and Thunderbolt).

[sw rec]

There’s a 95% chance I’ll make the switch from PC to MAC Studio max. Will have to have the 3-slot Sonnet case for my UAD Octo card, and I figured on 2 Samsung m.2 drives for my sessions.
Are these cards okay?
SYBA SI-PEX40110 M.2 M-Key NVMe PCI-e to PCI-e x4 Converter Card

[TrentWilliams]

+1 for the OWC4M2 with 4x 2Gb Samsung 980 Pro’s set to RAID 0 which enables you to use all 16 lanes of Thunderbolt thru for transfers of ~2500 m/bits.

I bought four of them.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

+1 for the OWC4M2 with 4x 2Gb Samsung 980 Pro’s set to RAID 0 which enables you to use all 16 lanes of Thunderbolt thru for transfers of ~2500 m/bits.

I bought four of them.

No it does not. The OWC 4M2 runs 4 x PCIe 3 lanes, one lane to each card, that is all it has/all it does. Cheap made solution that just physically spits the Thunderbolt PCIe lanes down as much as possible. There are no 16 lanes of PCIe anywhere inside that box. I've posted this many times on DUC.

2500 Mbit/s is just what you get sucking over those 4 x PCIe3 lanes with RAID. If you had 16 lanes of PCIe3 access to those M.2 cards you would have many several times this amount of bandwidth.

And when you don't use RAID, each drive gets 1 x PCIe 3 lane of throughput vs. the 4 x PCIe 3 lane it would get in a better implemented enclosure that uses a PCIe switch. And real world storage workloads may not be as good as RAID benchmarks imply. Still compared to a slow old rusty spinner these systems are fast.

[TrentWilliams]

Ah, my mistake.

Their website seems to say it’s x16?

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

[Righty27]

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

Ah, my mistake.

Their website seems to say it’s x16?

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

Hi Trent - your link clearly states ...

More Lanes = Faster Throughput
Accelsior 4M2 was designed with a PCIe switch to let your computer address each of the M.2 NVMe drives at full x4 PCIe speeds instead of hard-limiting each drive to x2 PCIe speeds. When running in JBOD, where all four drives are typically not accessed at the same time, each drive has the unlocked capability to run at full speed.

... so I think this is a victim of OWC's naming conventions, where the 'Accelsior 4M2' card also requires a PCIe chassis/enclosure, Darryl was referring to their all-in-one '4M2' device, which lacks a PCIe switch, here (I stand to be corrected) ...

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3EX4M2/