External SSD drive not recognised!

[5teq]

Chain:

MBP 2015 (mid) macOS sierra

-> Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter

-> i-tec thunderbolt 3 dock

-> i-tec MySafe Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe Metal External case (Samsung NVme m.2 970 2TB EVO inside)


What I’m doing wrong? Thunderbolt firmware? Should i upgrade to High Sierra?

 

[DeltaMac]

My first thought is that you may not have TB3 support, when connected to a computer (your MBPro) which does not have TB3 ports. You have an adapter, but that adapter does NOT give you TB3 when the original bus does not provide it.
I could be wrong on that, but the ultimate device right now is the MySafe NVMe drive case. I don't think that will work through an adapter, but requires a native TB3 connection.

You showed a screenshot of the Thunderbolt screen in System Information. What does the "Storage" tab show, also in System Information?

Try connecting your MySafe drive directly to the TB2-TB3 adapter (bypassing the dock!)
Does your Samsung 970 appear in your Disk Utility?
You might also test this from both High Sierra, and Mojave. That will tell you if you need that system upgrade - or it's not a software issue at all, and you might simply need to have devices that use TB2. If you don't want to disrupt your current Sierra system, you can install a basic system on an external drive, using High Sierra, then Mojave. I don't know if that will make a difference, but might be worth trying.

 

[Fishrrman]

If nothing else works, you could buy a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure with a connector for nvme, and use that instead.

Your data transfer speeds will be limited to about 850-900mbps, but at least it will work.

 

[matreya]

If nothing else works, you could buy a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure with a connector for nvme, and use that instead.

Your data transfer speeds will be limited to about 850-900mbps, but at least it will work.

How would he get those speeds on a 2015 MBP? He'd be using USB 3.0.

 

[Fishrrman]

"How would he get those speeds on a 2015 MBP? He'd be using USB 3.0."

He wouldn't.
The speeds I posted were for a connection that could support USB3.1 gen2.
On USB3 he should see reads around 430mbps (perhaps a little better) and writes around 350-375 (depends on drive make, model, capacity).

But that's better than what he's getting right now, which is.... nothing at all.

At some point in the future when he has a Mac that has direct support for thunderbolt3, he could take the drive out of the USB3.1 gen2 enclosure, and put it into a tbolt3 enclosure, and get much faster speeds from the same drive.
Or... just use it as USB3.1 gen2.

 

[5teq]

Thank you for all advices!

I've just upgraded to High Sierra - disk is recognized and working! How nice!
But...

I've been expecting higher disc speed. For now, in this setup Samsung 970 evo m.2 disk speed is ~1300 MB/s read/write (Blacmagic test). TB2 MBP port is 20 Gb/s (~2560 MB/s), i-tec MySafe case is 40 Gb/s (~5120 MB/s) and i-tec dock station is 40 Gb/s, too. And Samsung disk "stunning sequential read/write speeds of 3,500/2,500 MB/s".

So, in my opinion, external disk speed could be close to TB 2 speed (~2560 MB/s) not 2x slower.
Is there any solution? Is all about my CPU limitation?

 

[matreya]

The problem could be that the i-tec enclosure may claim it's 40 Gbps, but in reality it's not capable of delivering the speed. That, or there's a limitation in the TB2-TB3 adapter...