best thunderbolt 3 enclosure to ssd for mac mini 2018

[vagos1103gr]

Hi i have a Samsung 860 1tb ssd what is the best connection for the mac mini 2018? any good thunderbolt enclosure for fast connection? i have also a lacie thunderbolt 2 enclosure with a 500 ssd inside that i can swap it with the 1tb 860 ssd. do you think i am gonna loose speed because of the thunderbolt 2 only?

 

[F-Train]

You might find it helpful to have a look at this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/samsung-t5-x5-equivalents.2167739/

 

[treekram]

Hi i have a Samsung 860 1tb ssd what is the best connection for the mac mini 2018? any good thunderbolt enclosure for fast connection? i have also a lacie thunderbolt 2 enclosure with a 500 ssd inside that i can swap it with the 1tb 860 ssd. do you think i am gonna loose speed because of the thunderbolt 2 only?

The Samsung 860 (either Evo or Pro) is a SATA3 SSD and as such as a maximum throughput of 6Gb/sec. Thunderbolt 2 has a maximum throughput of 20Gb/sec. So theoretically, you won't have any performance gain in getting a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. In order to connect a Thunderbolt 2 device to the 2018 Mini, you would need a TB3->TB2 adapter and I don't know if there is a performance slowdown due to that conversion but if there is, it's not a major one. If you're going to spend the money to buy a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that supports a single SATA3 device just for the extra performance (if there actually is a difference), you would be better off buying a whole new device which has a PCIe NVMe SSD.

 

[Hessel89]

The Samsung 860 maxes out at around 500 MB/s so you definitely do not need thunderbolt 3. Any USB 3.0 or USB C 3.0 enclosure with SATA m.2 will be fine.