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OWC Announces First Thunderbolt 3 Certified Bus-Powered Storage Enclosure
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On Facebook OWC said it is Thunderbolt only.
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The OWC Blog post mentions the OWC Aura P12 SSD which currently comes in capacities up to 4TB but you can use any 2280 M.2 NVMe SSD.
4TB is expensive at this point. Still a lot cheaper than Apple’s prices for internal SSDs.
I don’t currently have any Mac with Thunderbolt 3, but if I get one this does look like a useful product.
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A USB4 computer needs to support PCIe tunnelling (optional) to support this type of Thunderbolt device. The computer might support PCIe tunnelling over USB4 but not over Thunderbolt (optional). In that case, you would need to connect a USB4 hub or dock which are required to support Thunderbolt on their downward facing ports (but these devices still require the computer to support PCIe tunnelling).
USB4 spec says the following about Thunderbolt and PCIe tunnelling support:
- USB4 hosts (PCIe controller is optional): Thunderbolt support is optional.
- USB4 peripherals (PCIe switch is optional): Thunderbolt support is optional.
- USB4 hubs (must contain a PCIe switch): Thunderbolt support is required for DFP.
- USB4 docks (subset of hubs so these must contain a PCIe switch): Thunderbolt support is required for UFP and DFP.
Oh good. I'm so glad after the completely non-confusing satiation where "USB 3.0", "USB 3.1 Gen 1" and "USB 3.2 1x1" all mean the same thing, they've decided to adopt both a 'hub' and 'dock' concept, and to allow ports to opt out of TB3
I guess it'd be far too ****ing convenient to just mandate that USB4 ports/devices must support PCIe tunneling, and have ports that don't... labeled as USB3.whatever.
This is where people need (or miss) the "it just works" factor with things Apple uses/works with/invents. FireWire, Thunderbolt (before the USB4 abomination), etc.
I would be highly surprised if the actual consumer products don't have TB3 (or, really, USB4 with TB3 compatability), the dev hardware doesnt because it's basically re-using the current iPad Pro SoC
i hope that’s the case. I don’t have a ton of TB3 hardware, but I’m wary of buying more until we know the plans for Apple Silicon Macs.
As does this: https://www.wavlink.com/en_us/product/WL-UTE01.html
But it’s an enclosure with a drive. Enclosure only not an option. But it’s much faster than this OWC one.
If you want a BYO drive option, choose this:
WL-UTE02 Thunderbolt™ 3 NVME External SSD Enclosure - WAVLINK See the world! Powered by Wavlink
UTE02 Thunderbolt™ 3 NVME External SSD Enclosure, It provides data transfer speed up to 6-7 times faster than SATA due to its NVMe spec ( PCIe Gen3 x 4 lanes )
This doesn't have the internal cable connection, but it has a contraption that screws an external cable in so that it's solid and secure. In the past I've had a lot of issues with TB3/USB-C cables being wobbly and disconnecting etc. Bot the above (internal cable and screw in contraption) solve that problem. I prefer the screw option because I don't have to pull the enclosure apart to disconnect or change the cable.
It's about the same speed as the first one, and thus also much faster than the OWC one. When attached to my MBP 16" it gives me this:
I actually have two striped together. Stripe doesn't quite double the speed but not far off:
That makes the pair about the same speed as the internal for writes, and significantly faster than the internal for reads! Note, to get that you have to connect one to each side of the MBP, to spread it across the two controllers (one controller each side, each drives both its side's two ports).
I needed some really high performance go anywhere external drives and found these options after a lot of searching. They're the only external bus powered TB3 enclosures that come close to the kinds of speeds TB3 should be able to do - that I could find. In OWC's defense, the 4M2 they make is pretty awesome and achieves similar speeds to the above (I have two of those and stripe them as well). Four NVMe M2 drives in one enclosure. Good for much higher capacities but not bus powered.
All this is with Samsung 970 EVOs.
You’re right. Looks like you are forced to use it that way because it’s that way in the picture. I guess there are special sensors that disable the hardware if it’s not mounted to your laptop lid. Or maybe they just send a guy over to your house to make sure.
Going off the picture it also seems like it only works outside on a park bench while wearing jeans.
Glad they provided this product photo to show the exact circumstances under which you can use the drive enclosure.
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Ha! I have a 2015 MacBook Pro with a 256GB internal SSD, which wasn't enough storage even when I bought it, but it was all I could afford at the time. A couple years ago, I bought a 1TB SSD, put it in a USB 3.0 enclosure, and Velcroed it to the top of my MBP. Sure, it's ugly, but it works! I call it the Remora Drive, after those fish that cling onto sharks. At various times, I've considered replacing the internal SSD with one of OWC's 1TB internal SSDs, but the computer is five years old, the 8GB of RAM isn't enough for some of the stuff I do, and I bought a 2019 iMac for the heavy lifting.
That is not the solution to the problem I'd prefer. If only there were some way to mount a replaceable storage device like that *inside* the computer while keeping the computer small and sleek.
Oh well, I guess if Apple's magical engineers can't figure it out, it must be impossible and the Razor Blade, Lenovo X1, Dell XPS, and the various ultraslim notebooks from Asus and MSI and others are just figments of our imagination.
Another thing you can do is just get a cheap pin adapter to plug an M.2 NVME SDD directly into your 2015 MacBook Pro. If it’s the 2015 15” model it should work fine with hibernate, and have awesome performance. I did this with my old 2015 MacBook Pro 15”.
Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card for Upgrade MacBook Air(2013-2016 Year) and MacBook PRO(Late 2013-2015 Year)
NOTICE:because too many customers can use it,I suggest you to try it again if your MAC can't detect nVME SSD. Pls notice to insert card fully into SSD slot and you must prepare bootable USB disk(see third point) with High Sierra to format M.2 SSD first, it can't support recover from internet. mai...
www.amazon.com
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Another thing you can do is just get a cheap pin adapter to plug an M.2 NVME SDD directly into your 2015 MacBook Pro. If it’s the 2015 15” model it should work fine with hibernate, and have awesome performance. I did this with my old 2015 MacBook Pro 15”.
Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card for Upgrade MacBook Air(2013-2016 Year) and MacBook PRO(Late 2013-2015 Year)
NOTICE:because too many customers can use it,I suggest you to try it again if your MAC can't detect nVME SSD. Pls notice to insert card fully into SSD slot and you must prepare bootable USB disk(see third point) with High Sierra to format M.2 SSD first, it can't support recover from internet. mai...www.amazon.com
Thanks for the tip! I have the 13" model.
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I do have that use too, but I find the Sandisk external USB-C SSDs more than good enough for that purpose and they're smaller and much, much cheaper than the OWC solution. They do bottleneck internally at 6Gbps, I believe there's a SATA-3 link internally which cause it, so they definitely don't compare to the OWC product. I do have a few and love them as external boot drives for my MBP as well as using them as very, very fast and high capacity USB drives. I still use Abobe CS6 which doesn't work on Catalina so I have a High Sierra install that also gives me tons more storage for my photo library than my internal SDD.
That said, this OWC is clearly intended to augment the lack of internal storage at a reasonable price that Apple gives you. Though I agree it would be excellent for your use case too.
I looked into it, I think hibernation would work fine with the 13” MacBook Pro. One of the most recent comments here is someone with the same setup:
Upgrading 2013/2014 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe
Are these the one's you are talking about? I have a 2015 MBP 15”. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-Internal-Performance-SB-ROCKET-1TB/dp/B07LGF54XR/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3AJ9JYB69866O&dchild=1&keywords=sabrent+rocket+1tb&qid=1593017253&sprefix=Sabrent%2Caps%2C231&sr=8-4...
forums.macrumors.com
There were two tiers of TB3 performance for the small SSDs: 10Gbps and 40Gbps. The lower one was around $30-$40 on amazon, the higher one $100+. This one is smack in the middle: better performance, cheaper price. I think this one is going to be the value performance.
It's the one I'll buy; I don't need realtime video levels of performance, but it's super fast enough at a price point that's not unreasonable. I'll take that extra $40 and get a bigger SSD.
I hope that ARM Macs stick with Thunderbolt. I have invested in quite a few Thunderbolt RAID arrays that will outlive my current iMac and Mac mini, which they're attached to.
The guys over at OWC themselves were musing about this very question:
https://blog.macsales.com/63118-thunderbolt-on-apple-processor-macs/
The guys over at OWC themselves were musing about this very question:
https://blog.macsales.com/63118-thunderbolt-on-apple-processor-macs/
You do realize that macOS isn't just software and it does take up physical space in the computer, right? That's the reason why those other companies can do it - they put all that stuff in instead of macOS. Sorry... you can't have it both ways.
That claim of “UP TO1553MB/s” is for "REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCE" on the vendor’s web site… not benchmark results. Keep in mind that all of today’s M.2 NVME boards throttle their speed when getting hot under rapid usage. I would reserve your judgement until real units ship.
If only more vendors advertised real-world performance rather than some artificial peak result unattainable in practical usage.
Coincidentally, I'm in the market for such a device. In fact, I'm trying a few of these enclosures. There's one from Fledging that has a small fan to keep the SSD cool (somewhat noisy to me), and another from TEKQ (but it failed after a day; getting a replacement to test again). I installed a 500GB Samsung EVO m.2 NVMe in both of them. I also got the Samsung X5 (500GB) to compare against them.
Blackmagic tests shows they are all close in write/read speeds, between 1581/2387 Mbps and 1723/2583 Mbps.
The claim that they have the first Thunderbolt 3 certified bus-powered storage enclosure is laughable since I've seen many such devices available on Amazon now. Unless they mean it's OWC's first such device. This OWC enclosure is much cheaper than the ones I have. I wonder why.
Blackmagic tests shows they are all close in write/read speeds, between 1581/2387 Mbps and 1723/2583 Mbps.
The claim that they have the first Thunderbolt 3 certified bus-powered storage enclosure is laughable since I've seen many such devices available on Amazon now. Unless they mean it's OWC's first such device. This OWC enclosure is much cheaper than the ones I have. I wonder why.
Note that Thunderbolt in 2020 Ice Lake MacBook Pro doesn't have that limitation. You can use any two ports (same side or different side) and get the same top performance.
Ice Lake CPU on-die Thunderbolt 3 Controller Bandwidth
Thanks to @joevt for the suggestion of raiding two high-speed NVMe drives through Thunderbolt 3 ports, I was able to confirm the on-die TB3 controller...
egpu.io
The 10 Gbps tier is not Thunderbolt - it is USB 3.1 gen 2 - and therefore compatible with more computers. Are there two tiers of TB3 controller (one with less performance than the other)?
Up to now, only max performance has been reported on vendor websites. I don't think it was a good idea to start reporting real-world performance this late in the game... Even this vendor reports 2800 MB/s on some products (that's higher than the 22 Gbps 2750 MB/s limit that we know about - maybe they rounded up or maybe computer performance has improved since Intel first quoted 22 Gbps) without showing benchmarks like they do for non-Thunderbolt products. They don't explain how they got the 2800 MB/s number. So given that, perhaps this real-world performance number is near to max performance number because of PCIe limit inside the enclosure. We'll find out when someone tests it - The PCI section of System Information.app will tell what the PCIe link is.
In the meantime we can talk about the enclosure design or whatever. The internal Thunderbolt connection makes it slightly bulkier than the Trebleet. Both have an aluminum case. I think Samsung X5 is even larger and has a plastic case with internal heat sink?
Thunderbolt 3 external drive slot + M.2/NGFF adapter?
This is probably going to sound ridiculous but is it possible for me to remove the m.2 drive from my Samsung X5 external thunderbolt 3 drive, and hook...
egpu.io
It's not great. Writes are pretty darn slow. But reads are much faster than writes, good enough for media and certain space-hogging things like Xcode, Android Studio, and their libraries.
