Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosures

[EugW]

My Thunderbolt 4 cable wasn’t long enough so I put my LG supplied 5-foot USB-C cable there instead. (They don’t say what kind of USB-C cable it is.) Not surprisingly the drive ran slower and with lower power, and I guessed it would be USB 3, but instead it’s running as USB 4 at 20 Gbps. That actually works well for that drive, since it’s a Time Machine drive running at lower power now, but is still reasonably speedy for that purpose. It’s as stable as my other USB 4 / Thunderbolt 40 Gbps drive, and I don’t get that wake from sleep issue that I occasionally get with USB 3 SSDs. (BTW, this was cross-posted from here.)

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That USB-C cable was a USB3 cable, apparently spec'd for the 10 Gbps USB-C ports on my monitor. While under everyday general use it was perfectly fine, under extended heavy benchmarking at USB4 20 Gbps, it was not reliable. I then purchased a USB-IF certified USB4 20 Gbps cable and it works great at 20 Gbps.

Of course, if I use a certified TB4 or USB4 40 Gbps cable, it runs fine at 40 Gbps when directly connected to my Mac. However, I'm using 20 Gbps because if I'm connecting through the monitor, it can't do 40 Gbps writes anyway. (The monitor itself takes up over half of the 40 Gbps bandwidth.) 20 Gbps mode uses a bit less power too.