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.