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Recommend me a USB4/TB4/5 NVMe Enclosure
- Thread starter blufrog
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holy crap
How did you and i end up with the same enclosure and SSD choice. Especially weird since both items are never discussed.
We're both definitely bargain hunters lol.
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sorry, not educated on SSD differences, but the Pro is selling for $20 more at B&H and on the Samsung website:
Yes you are correct. The 990 Pro is $270 not $260 like I thought. But anyway that’s only a $20 difference. In an enclosure the Pro should have better performance under some conditions, but the EVO Plus should cooler. However, nobody here has posted real world results with the EVO Plus yet.
I got a couple of those with Team NVMe. The Team NVMe cause PCIe bus resets if the bus is saturated too long for an extended period of time. OK for serving media files but not good for running VMs.
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I plan on having this attached 24/7, mostly office work, some very light video (about to purchase an insta360 and likely 4K 60 or 120fps). Heat would be a concern, wondering if Pro is overkill? Think would rather have a cooler running SSD?
price difference is negligible so not a factor.
I have this enclosure which I bought years ago just as a backup. Or at least very similar. Mine is the M2PV-C3 10 Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2. Never used it, but I'll try it soon enough. However, I wonder if it's not getting enough power to the drive, since USB 3.1 may provide just 7.5 watts. How power hungry is your SSD?
Back when I got this enclosure, the SSDs I had generally used less power than they do these days.
Not sure, but I suspect the EVO Plus would run fine except in some specific situations which you may not necessarily encounter.
Personally my plan is to go with the 990 Pro for my main data drive, and some DRAM-less model for my Time Machine backup drive.
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Thanks for the reply. I'm looking at the 40Gbps ones like https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-Upgraded-Enclosure-PCIe3-0x4-Thunderbolt/dp/B0B2PFRCMG
I used the uGreen one but the fan buzzed and whined and did my head in. I did actually block the fan from spinning as a test and it was still a good enclosure, but not for £99. May revisit it now it's cheaper for black friday. I'm running Hynix P31 NVMe which are notoriously cooler than others.
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These are the results of my Qwiizlab USB 4 enclosure (and Orico USB 3 enclosure) with Samsung 990 Pro:
I'm curious what everyone's reasons are for buying enclosures and separate SSDs when buying a fully packaged SSD is often cheaper or very close. I've gotten quite used to using bare metal HDDs because they're more convenient to store for archival purposes, but I'm having trouble seeing the same attraction to naked NVMe modules.
Having my own enclosure for my HDDs made sense because hard drives fail more often and the speed of the enclosure isn't the bottleneck so I can spend on the perfect enclosure and keep using it for years to come. With SSDs, the opposite is true. Instead of ending up with 4 hard drives and one enclosure after 8 years, I might have 4 enclosures and one SSD module.
Is anyone else arriving to a similar conclusion?
Having my own enclosure for my HDDs made sense because hard drives fail more often and the speed of the enclosure isn't the bottleneck so I can spend on the perfect enclosure and keep using it for years to come. With SSDs, the opposite is true. Instead of ending up with 4 hard drives and one enclosure after 8 years, I might have 4 enclosures and one SSD module.
Is anyone else arriving to a similar conclusion?
Like what? There aren't many out there that are comparable in the 4 TB size range with DRAM. I see stuff like the OWC 1M2* (USB 4) or the SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 (Thunderbolt 3). Guess what? Both are standard NVMe drives in enclosures, but often are slower than our DIY options. They also run as hot as the DIY options. I'm reading the Amazon reviews of the SanDisk one, and there are a lot of negative reviews, complaining about reliability. Also, idle temp isn't any better. Tom's Hardware reports the SanDisk's idle temperature at 45 C.
Ones like the Samsung T7 run at USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 speeds meaning their maximum speed is less than 1/3rd the USB 4 drives, and they are DRAM-less.
*I'm not sure if the OWC 1M2 pre-packaged drives have DRAM or not.
BTW, I have several pre-packaged SSDs. I have a 1 TB Samsung T5, 2 TB Samsung T7, and 2 TB Samsung T7 Shield. The problem with these is that they can't be upgraded, so for example, I'm having trouble figuring out what to do with the 1 TB drive since it is no longer of sufficient size for my needs.
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I should have qualified that I'm excluding bleeding edge stuff like the TB5 OWC Envoy Ultra. I'm primarily talking about the stuff in the USB 3.2 Gen 2 speed range where there's a convergence of many options for external enclosures and consumer market SSDs alike.
I didn't factor in the size of the drive though so that's one obvious good use case. If you want larger than a 4TB SSD, your only option is to go with an enclosure.
So is everyone in this conversation looking at SSDs in the 4TB and beyond range or buying bleeding edge enclosures to get the fastest speed possible?
My dilemma is this... I was considering buying a high spec'd enclosure and pairing it with a 2TB SSD that I'd probably eventually replace with a 4TB SSD in a few years, but I realized that in a few years there would likely be a price competitive consumer market 4TB SSD that would match today's high spec enclosure and I'd could just buy that instead when the time comes.
USB 4 and Thunderbolt 3 enclosures aren’t bleeding edge technology either. All Apple Silicon Macs since the 2020 launch have supported those protocols. It’s just nice that we can take advantage of those speeds without paying through the nose now.
What I’d like to see is something with thermals of the T7 Shield but with DRAM and USB 4 speed, but AFAIK, that does not exist.
Work in progress, Apple Mini 4 Pro Enclosure, Acasis NVMe Enclosure and CFexpress card reader. Complete with Power Button. 2nd prototype, hopefully I’ll have success with 2nd Attempt? Printing now.
I‘m pleased how it came out, usually takes at least three prototypes to get it right.
I‘m pleased how it came out, usually takes at least three prototypes to get it right.
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You don't have to trash smaller SSD's, instead set them up as JBOD drives using Disk Utility, you can combine different size capacities together. For example I have a 2 and 4TB Samsung T7 Shields as a 6TB JBOD and 3 of the SanDisk Extreme Pro V2's @ 4TB as a 12 TB JBOD set. They all run around 850-925 MB/s this way, just a bit faster than a single SSD alone.
You do need a high output cable to each SSD though, I bought 5 rated 40Gb/s cables on sale for less than $20 each. I have the 3 SanDisk V2's hooked up to the Apple Studio Display ports, and the 2 Samsungs work off the front ports of the M2 Mac Studio Max.
In your case combining the T5 with the T7 SSD drives most likely will cause a R/W slowdown though, as the T5 is rated for about 1/2 the speed of the T7's. But you could easily combine the 2 T7's to get a 4TB drive and maintain the same T7 speeds.
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This is not a good idea IMO, since it increases the risk of data loss. I don't have enough ports anyway, unless I want to risk running the a set of spanned JBOD disks off a hub.
OK, this is in the ballpark of what I'm trying to grasp. I also have the problem of having too many stray stand alone SSDs that are too small or slow for regular use, but I'd rather have that issue as I can always find a use for more backup storage.
If you got all of those as stand alone SSD modules so that you'd have a suitable enclosure for each drive you were actively using, how many enclosures would you have by now and would all of the enclosures still be ones you'd still want to use?
Also, if you got those drives as modules, how would you use the grab bag of SSDs that you now have? Would you then buy a drive bay and run them in RAID array sets or bundle them together similarly to what @SpecFoto suggested, but in a proper multi-drive storage bay?
My goal is to consume less and spend less money, but everytime I try to plan out that scenario by buying a high end enclosure and my own modules so I can avoid Apple's storage pricing, I don't see a clear win.
This scenario may be heavily influenced by that my upgrade cycle is 3-5 years. If I upgraded every 1-2 years, it's easier to make this work out financially in favor of carrying my own storage forward for several upgrade cycles, but I would still end up owning more enclosures than I'd want to have.
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I would have two or three enclosures, depending upon how many old SSDs I'd want to keep. However for the enclosures for the old smaller drives, I'd just buy USB 3 enclosures for much cheaper than a USB 4 enclosure. The USB 3 enclosures also run cooler. Or perhaps I'd just buy a dock. That's how I recycled my old SATA drives. I ended up buying a USB 3 SATA dock and would backup to bare SATA drives in the dock. And then the backups would go into storage. USB 3 NVMe docks cost about US$25-30.
For the pre-packaged SSDs, I bought a 2 TB Samsung T7 to replace the 1 TB Samsung T5 drive. And now I'm buying the 4 TB USB 4 drive to replace one of the 2 TB T7 ones.
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To each their own. I have been running RAID systems for my Macs since 2010 and have never lost any data. RAID drives must be the same size or else the larger drive is limited to the size of the smallest. JBOD eliminates this and can work with different size drives. I went all SSD about 2-1/2 years ago with SanDisk Extreme V2 in a RAID 8TB and JBOD set with at first 10TB, and now 12TB (replacing a 2TB with a 4TB) and have had no issues or data loss. These are used daily and always attached to my Macs. All bus powered and take up very little desktop space.
Backups is 2 Oyen Digital Mini Pro dual bay RAID enclosures @12TB each (4 and 8TB Sata III Samsung SSD's) set up as JBOD. Still have 2 dual bay HDD Raids at 16TB each for level 3 backup. Did have to replace a couple of Seagate HDD's as Drive DX indicated potential issues though.
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Glad you've been lucky. I have had RAID5 go down due to failed drives and fail to rebuild (many years ago). (Yes, fortunately I had backups.) Ultimately I don't see the advantage for my personal use so I've stopped using any sort of RAID for my critical data. It's much simpler (and also safer), just to have a single SSD of the right capacity with appropriate backups, instead of dealing with complicated workarounds to make use of older small drives. Luckily, a single 4 TB SSD is more than sufficient for my needs, and a USB 4 enclosure is lightning fast and simple, all for just a few hundred bucks. Along with this I use iCloud backup and Time Machine, and I repurpose some of those old drives for backups off-site.
This is not correct for some RAID systems. For example with my Synology 4-bay NAS, 2 TB x 2 plus 1 TB x 2 using traditional RAID5 would result in a 2.7 TB size with 930 GB protection, whereas the same drives using SHR would result in a 3.6 TB size with 1.8 TB protection.
But like I said, I don't use RAID for my main data anymore because I find it a hassle and unnecessary for my needs.
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I just bought this enclosure and the Samsung 990 Pro from Samsung EPP for less than $400 total shipped. Good deal!!I like this one:
OWC Express 1M2 - The Fastest Single Portable SSD We Offer
Ultra-fast, compatible, and reliable portable USB4 NVMe SSD with speeds up to 3836MB/s. Build your own or choose ready-to-run solutions for your Mac or PC.eshop.macsales.com
even though it's USB4 instead of Thunderbolt, TRIM works out of the box and it's faster than Thunderbolt 3.