Hi, i am a new user, first of all, sorry for my poor English. I have used the help of Translatium.
I read the thread with some interest. I recently bought the Mac Mini M1, with 256Gb and seeing how expensive it is to increase to 512Gb,
I decided to look at alternatives with external ssd, seeing that the best option to obtain a performance similar to the internal ssd was to use a thunderbolt 3 enclosures, which in some cases are quite expensive.
I was looking at it for days before buying the Mac Mini, and looking for AliExpress, YouTube and the web.
I saw an interesting opportunity with the Acassis Thunderbolt 3 box with Intel JHL6340 Chipset for 56 euros.
https://es.aliexpress.com/item/4000460513637.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.2a2763c0Fdv2RV
Now it has risen 10 euros, but it is still a good price, in my case as I wanted it to use in thunderbolt 3 and nothing else, I discarded the version with JHL7540 which is a little more expensive.
On the other hand, I had already bought a 1Tb XPG Gammix S11 Pro ssd for 130 Euros, which is a good product without any doubt.
I tried it and the truth is that the results were disappointing, getting about 1200 Mb / s both in writing and reading.
This is when one has doubts about the causes, since they can be very diverse:
-The box is not of good quality internally and does not give more than itself. Although it is true that at least in reading it promises 2700 Mb / s and in writing 1500 Mb / s
-Incompatibility of some type of this type of box or its chipset with Mac Mini or the M1 processor.
-Incompatibility of the ssd with OSX drivers or with the Intel JHL6340 controller.
Then I remembered something watching one of the youtube videos about the Acasis enclosure.
Although the test is on an iMac, we can see that it tests a Samsung EVO 970 and then it tests Western Digital sn750.
We can see that Samsung experiences low writing speed, but instead with Digital it is better.
After I think that looking through this forum if I'm not mistaken, I saw some information about the Shell Thunder enclosure.
https://fledging.net/products/shell-thunder
The interesting thing is what the Samsung EVO 970 plus puts about it. And we see that they recommend the ssd Western Digital black, also the Sabrent Rocket Q seems a good option.
I suspect that all these Chinese enclosure are similar.
I decided to return the XPG Gammix S11 Pro and I bought a WD SN750 1Tb.
I have tested it this morning and I can confirm that it is compatible and works perfectly.
View attachment 1726536
As you can see, the speeds achieved with Western Digital are very similar to those of the 256Gb internal Mac mini's SSD. Curiously there are rumors that the internal ssd may be Sandisk / Western Digital.
With this we can conclude that it is quite likely that it is a compatibility problem of this type of enclouse with the different brands and models of m2 ssd.