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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. It lends support to UASP and Trim protocols, armed with the advanced RTL9210B chip that works tirelessly to prevent short-circuits and over-current scenarios, promising a secure and stable environment for your SSD. As for enclosures that match these specifications, there are several Thunderbolt-based variants on the market such as the Acasis TBU401. This one uses an Intel JHL7440 Thunderbolt 3 controller and offers sequential performance of around 2,700 MB/s when equipped with a high-end NVMe SSD. I 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. 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.
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 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. Diving deeper into the compatibility aspect, it’s designed to house PCIe NVMe M-Key M.2 SSDs with a capacity of up to 4TB. It accommodates a range of sizes including 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 SSDs. However, it draws a line by not supporting M.2 SATA-based SSDs, M.2 PCIe AHCI SSDs, and any SSD from Mac. Yeah, thats pretty similar to the bench I did in the enclosure. Though for time I limited the run to 3 instead of 5. This enclosure is also the fastest of the bunch, but only by about 15-20MB/s pure sequential with large files.The aluminum alloy casing of the enclosure does an outstanding job of dissipating heat and maintaining performance. This is one of the most performant 10 Gbps enclosures and one of the most convenient, thanks to a tool-free design that allows you to slip the cover off by pressing a spring-loaded switch. It's a few dollars more than the Sabrent EC-SNVE at present and we prefer that enclosure's flip-up lid to the Plugble's slide-out one. 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.
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.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. Another aluminum enclosure that is sleek and reliable in thermal performance. This enclosure is only available for M-Key M.2 SSDs i.e. M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs of up to 80mm in size. Most popular brands such as Samsung and Sabrent produce them. At this price point, you can easily get an external SSD. But, ROG Strix Arion has got its own unique features. The device leverages the capabilities of USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 technology, providing data transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps. But, again, it only supports M.2 NVMe SSDs, not M.2 SATA SSDs.
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. That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might supportonlyM.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed. I work for a very large company and when an Exec wants that data, all the valid reasons in the world won't help you. So I needed the ability to shove the drive into an enclosure and access it. Now, to reiterate an important point: A drive may come in the M.2 form factor, but that says nothing about the bus that it makes use of. Determining that is just as important as making sure it fits. If cost is a concern, go with a PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMe SSD like Crucial P2 and an enclosure like Orico M2PV-C3. If your device has a Thunderbolt 3 port, you can opt for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD like Samsung 980 PRO and an enclosure like OWC Envoy Express.The SATA drives were all in a Startech USB M.2 SATA enclosure. The USB's are of course simply USBs. The SHE-C325 isn’t the most attractive enclosure on the market, but it does use mostly aluminum casing (the left part near the USB port is plastic) and at 4.5 x 1.5 x 0.4 inches, it’s pretty portable. SSK’s enclosure also comes with a thermal pad to help send heat to the aluminum casing, but you’ll only want to use it if your SSD doesn’t have a built-in heat spreader. M.2 SSDs offer superior performance to traditional hard drives. External enclosures are being used to replace traditional portable storage. These best M.2 enclosures offer huge performance enhancements and thermal solutions that deliver uncompressed performance speed.
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