Best external drive enclosure for 970 Evo Plus

[majormike]

Hi,

What's the best drive enclosure for my 2 tb 970 Evo Plus?

I'm fine with transfer speeds for 1000mb/s since the drive won't get so hot through that and throttle and I need it for Audio Projects mainly.

 

[Mac... nificent]

Stay away from cheap chinese enclosures and only buy from reputable brands, and you will be alright.

 

[qap]

I'm very happy with this ICY BOX enclosure (1GB/s) not Thunderbolt 3:

PS: with a Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 external disk it reaches about 2.5GB/s but you have to spend more

 

[mj_]

I've been using the $20 SSK aluminum USB 3.2 Gen 2 enclosure with my 970 EVO on my iMac since August without any issues, which should be capable of between 700-900 MB/s. Alternatively, you could spend 4x as much on the Wavlink UTE02 Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for maximum performance of 2000+ MB/s. I haven't used the latter yet so I can't comment on its reliability but it's been around for over a year now and there aren't any known issues as far as I can tell.

 

[Modernape]

Plugable USB 3.1 Gen 2

 

[majormike]

I'm very happy with this ICY BOX enclosure (1GB/s) not Thunderbolt 3:

PS: with a Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 external disk it reaches about 2.5GB/s but you have to spend more

I used to own this one before I gave it away when i didn't anticipate owning another apple computer again but I remember it not being so nice because the USB Port, whenever you plugged it in, was shoving the PCB with the SSD on it making a scratching noise on the SSD which then led me to never detach the cable from the drives side.

 

[gogogo2]

Thunderbolt 3 case,

 

[majormike]

I was going through all the options but anything good starts at around 80 upwards and for that i could already get a brand ssd with storage from western digital or samsung no?

 

[crevalic]

I was going through all the options but anything good starts at around 80 upwards and for that i could already get a brand ssd with storage from western digital or samsung no?

Expensive enclosures support TB3, which means they are significantly faster (2x to more than 4x) than the cheap external SSDs which only support USB connectivity and often contain SATA drives. $80+ NVMe enclosures are more comparable to drives like Samsung X5, which costs $600 for a 2TB version. As @mj_ said above, you can get a 10Gbps USB NVMe enclosure for like $20 on amazon, which should get you to around 1GB/s you are looking for with a solid drive like the 970 evo plus. The best rated NVMe enclosure for M1 macs is Acasis usb 4.0 nvme enclosure, which you can get on Aliexpress for ~$100 or on Amazon for a bit more. This one supports TB3 and all USB protocols, so it will work even on PCs and older Macs.

Do note though, that M1 Macs and Big Sur seem to have major issues with external drives, with many 10Gbps USB drives running at only 5Gbps, which halves their speed. Issues seem to be especially major with Samsung products, with Samsung drives not reaching rated speeds, especially in writing, even in well regarded TB3 enclosures.

 

[majormike]

Expensive enclosures support TB3, which means they are significantly faster (2x to more than 4x) than the cheap external SSDs which only support USB connectivity and often contain SATA drives. $80+ NVMe enclosures are more comparable to drives like Samsung X5, which costs $600 for a 2TB version. As @mj_ said above, you can get a 10Gbps USB NVMe enclosure for like $20 on amazon, which should get you to around 1GB/s you are looking for with a solid drive like the 970 evo plus. The best rated NVMe enclosure for M1 macs is Acasis usb 4.0 nvme enclosure, which you can get on Aliexpress for ~$100 or on Amazon for a bit more. This one supports TB3 and all USB protocols, so it will work even on PCs and older Macs.

Do note though, that M1 Macs and Big Sur seem to have major issues with external drives, with many 10Gbps USB drives running at only 5Gbps, which halves their speed. Issues seem to be especially major with Samsung products, with Samsung drives not reaching rated speeds, especially in writing, even in well regarded TB3 enclosures.

Isn't there then a conclusion on which drives to get it which enclosures with which chip?

 

[t0pher]

Bump

other half needs at least 2tb of cost effective ssd storage for photos (1.2tb library) & video editing On an m1 iMac.

shes just ordered a T7 2tb usb 3.2 gen 2.

I’ve read a couple of mentions of issues with Samsung usb drives but no real detail of the issue or if it’s been resolve.

is the Samsung usb issue resolved now?