Thunderbolt 3 / 4 / USB 4 NVMe Enclosures
The best enclosures for high speed transfers (2.5GB/s+) usually have one of these 2 chipsets:- Thunderbolt 3: Intel's JHL7440, e.g.
- Acasis TBU-401 / 405
- Orico TB3-S2
- USB 4: Asmedia ADM2464PD
References
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Thanks to @joevt:
Use the following command to get PCI information from a Mac:
Code:
Bash:
ioreg -lric IOPCIHostBridge | grep -E '([ :]IOPCI(Device|Host|Bridge))|(vendor|device)-id|class-code|subsystem|IOPCIExpress(Capabilities|Link(Status|Capabilities))' | sed -E '/(.*), id 0x.*/s//\1>/' | tr '|' ' '
Then we can find the vendor and product ID of the IOPCI2PCIBridge's that belong to the Thunderbolt or USB4 device. On an Intel Mac, I would use my pcitree.sh script to get the info.
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Original post:
Since I am owning a great new MacBook Pro, I have been searching the web for a worthy external storage to go with it.
So far, I only know of stationary Thunderbolt 3 drives (mainly in the form of full-size PCIe boxes with NVMe SSDs in them or large RAID systems that weigh upwards of 5 kg), but I am wondering, whether there's such a thing as an M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure that uses Thunderbolt 3 to connect to the computer.
I could not find anything like that up until now, with the closest match being a bulky M.2 enclosure from Sonnet that is called a "Windows Edition" (probably due to an incompatible TB3 chipset, I guess).
On the other hand, there are some cheap USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C enclosures on Amazon, that can house an M.2 SATA SSD, which will not get you the highest transfer speeds possible (in fact, they are pretty limited at the 480 MB/s that USB 3.1 Gen1 supports), with NVMe and Thunderbolt being able to transfer data much faster (theoretically 5 GB/s, but at this point in time the highest rates I could find for desktop drives were about 2400 MB/s).
And last but not least there are the Glyph Atom (RAID) SSDs, which get closer (~800 MB/s) to the speed I desire, but still use USB 3.1 Gen2, and they are rather expensive at 1 TB at ~ $ 420. (usual prices for M.2 NVMe SSDs range from 450 to 600 bucks and they are way faster at ~1600 to 3200 MB/s read speed).
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