Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosures

[incumbent]

For the Gigadrive that is now delayed, since it uses Goshen ridge, and has only 1 Pcie lane, you’re saying that the 2800 MBP/s is channeled only through that 1 lane? (Confused because you’re saying that it would be limited to 750 mb/s)

2800 MBps is ~ 22Gbps and while that's pretty fast I think "world's fastest" may have been a year or two ago because the Sabrent PCIe 4x4 4TB NVMe drive I had to buy for my PlayStation has read speeds over 6000MBps. In my Express 4m2 enclosure rated for 2800MBps I didn't spend that much for the fastest ones I could get mostly because the enclosure's limit means most of that extra performance wouldn't be realized. I don't know if there are any external enclosures for multiple NVMe devices that opens up enough lanes to actually hit that top speed.

One thing I haven't seen benchmarked is multiple Thunderbolt NVMe devices connected to the same Thunderbolt port of an integrated Thunderbolt controller (Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Apple Silicon) since integrated Thunderbolt controllers don't use real PCIe (they are inside a CPU so it doesn't need to be limited by PCIe) they won't necessarily be limited to 3500 MB/s. So in this setup while the max of each Thunderbolt NVMe device will be ≈2800 MB/s, they might have a higher total up to 40 Gbps.

I'm an edge case; my Express 4m2 enclosure is a zpool and benchmarking that is really hard to do accurately or comparably because of the ARC cache in addition to what macOS might be doing. I took a cruise through ioreg and nothing stood out in terms of the thunderbolt/pci hardware, it looks like it's using what is provided by the CPU on the macmini8,1 I've plugged it into. I have one bus (port1+port2) dedicated to an Akito Node Titan eGPU at 4x lanes and then my OWC TB3 dock and OWC Express 4m2 plugged in to port3+port4.

 

[joevt]

2800 MBps is ~ 22Gbps and while that's pretty fast I think "world's fastest" may have been a year or two ago because the Sabrent PCIe 4x4 4TB NVMe drive I had to buy for my PlayStation has read speeds over 6000MBps.

World's fastest maybe refers to the set of Thunderbolt drives. No single Thunderbolt drive is going to give more than 3100 MB/s. The difference in speed between Thunderbolt drives is a non-issue - they're all about the same so being the fastest doesn't mean anything.

In my Express 4m2 enclosure rated for 2800MBps I didn't spend that much for the fastest ones I could get mostly because the enclosure's limit means most of that extra performance wouldn't be realized. I don't know if there are any external enclosures for multiple NVMe devices that opens up enough lanes to actually hit that top speed.

The only way to get more performance is to raid different Thunderbolt devices together or to not use Thunderbolt for the connection.

I'm an edge case; my Express 4m2 enclosure is a zpool and benchmarking that is really hard to do accurately or comparably because of the ARC cache in addition to what macOS might be doing. I took a cruise through ioreg and nothing stood out in terms of the thunderbolt/pci hardware, it looks like it's using what is provided by the CPU on the macmini8,1 I've plugged it into. I have one bus (port1+port2) dedicated to an Akito Node Titan eGPU at 4x lanes and then my OWC TB3 dock and OWC Express 4m2 plugged in to port3+port4.

The 4M2 is four NVMe connected at PCIe 3.0 x1 (one lane each). The PCIe bridge is the Thunderbolt controller itself. So each NVMe can only do up to ≈750 MB/s. That means you can choose 4 garbage NVMe (even ones that behave badly in Thunderbolt enclosures) and still get ≈2800 MB/s if they are RAID 0.

What I want to see benchmarked is two separate Thunderbolt NVMe devices connected to the same Thunderbolt port of an integrated Thunderbolt controller. The Macmini8,1 has two discrete Thunderbolt controllers (Titan Ridge) and the 4M2 is a single Thunderbolt device. Titan Ridge can do ≈22 Gbps per port and ≈23 Gbps with two ports and ≈38 Gbps with two controllers (just going from memory, I haven't benchmarked it recently).

 

[- rob -]

For price get a Acasis TB3 + WD 750.

Thanks for your post.

Is this the 750 you're suggesting? Also, it looks like maybe there are two models of the 750, one with reduced write speeds.

I'm not seeing the Acasis TB3 on newegg or Amazon, only the USB4.0 version.

 

[Mr. Titanium]

Recently got my hands on Samsung 980 Pro 1TB. Thought I'd share my results when paired with M1 MacBook Air and Acasis USB 4 Enclosure:

Encrypted

Black Magic:

R: 2260 MB/s W: 2337 MB/s

Amorphous DiskMark:

R: 2693 MB/s W: 2365 MB/s;

4KQD1 R: 61 MB/s W: 35 MB/s

Unencrypted

Black Magic:

R: 2804 MB/s W: 2706 MB/s

Amorphous DiskMark:

R: 3096 MB/s W: 973 MB/s;

4KQD1 R: 58.49 MB/s W: 37 MB/s

For those interested, user experience like launching apps, multi-tasking and other day to day usage is pretty smooth and fluid like the internal drive when the drive is used as the boot drive. In my case, I prefer using it as a boot drive when connected to an external monitor.

 

[mick2]

Recently got my hands on Samsung 980 Pro 1TB. Thought I'd share my results when paired with M1 MacBook Air and Acasis USB 4 Enclosure:

Encrypted

Black Magic:

R: 2260 MB/s W: 2337 MB/s

Amorphous DiskMark:

R: 2693 MB/s W: 2365 MB/s;

4KQD1 R: 61 MB/s W: 35 MB/s

Unencrypted

Black Magic:

R: 2804 MB/s W: 2706 MB/s

Amorphous DiskMark:

R: 3096 MB/s W: 973 MB/s;

4KQD1 R: 58.49 MB/s W: 37 MB/s

For those interested, user experience like launching apps, multi-tasking and other day to day usage is pretty smooth and fluid like the internal drive when the drive is used as the boot drive. In my case, I prefer using it as a boot drive when connected to an external monitor.

Any idea why the large discrepancy between encrypted/unencrypted write speed in Amorphous Disk Mark?

 

[Mr. Titanium]

Any idea why the large discrepancy between encrypted/unencrypted write speed in Amorphous Disk Mark?

I don't know. My best guess would probably be how these applications work

 

[Rock Star]

Synthetic benchmark write speeds of Acasis w/ WD SN750 1TB and Fledging w/ WD SN750 1TB significantly increase on M1 Max MacBook Pro.

M1 Pro and M1 Max | Choose The Fastest External SSD?

AmorphousDiskMark results: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxZm7TqxDz9G_MafoFsdqIT1wyXd8i3o8W

 

[wills11]

I'm having great luck with the Fledging Shell Thunder enclosure and an Inland Premium 2TB SSD.

Not only are the speeds great on my 2019 iMac 5k, but the customer service from Fledging was superb. I had an issue with the fan on the one I bought—it's a known issue where the fan gets stuck, and despite following their instructions to free it, mine wouldn't spin up properly. Not only did they immediately ship out a replacement, but I didn't need to return the faulty one (meaning I got to keep the working TB3 cable). Seems like a great company.

It appears to be a bit more expensive than some other options, but the build quality seems terrific and the active cooling keeps the stick cool even under full load—as you can see, it's never even cracked 50° — if only I could say that about my 7200 RPM HDDs!

The speed is nothing record-breaking, but it's more than fast enough for my uses, and outperforms my iMac's internal SSD on synthetic benchmarks.

 

[incumbent]

What I want to see benchmarked is two separate Thunderbolt NVMe devices connected to the same Thunderbolt port of an integrated Thunderbolt controller. The Macmini8,1 has two discrete Thunderbolt controllers (Titan Ridge) and the 4M2 is a single Thunderbolt device. Titan Ridge can do ≈22 Gbps per port and ≈23 Gbps with two ports and ≈38 Gbps with two controllers (just going from memory, I haven't benchmarked it recently).

I will be back at that house in another week and I can export my pool, put one NVMe drive in the Express 4M2 and one in a sabrent TB3 single-device enclosure that gets hot enough to burn you, that's all I have laying around at the moment.

I can run fio or something on both devices separately and simultaneously and then create a stripe and mirror using Apple's software RAID and APFS.

 

[joevt]

I can run fio or something on both devices separately and simultaneously and then create a stripe and mirror using Apple's software RAID and APFS.

What is fio? ATTO Disk Benchmark.app can test multiple drives at the same time without having to create a RAID. The numbers it gives should be higher than RAID 0 because the drives don't need to be the same speed for best results (in other words, in a non-RAID situation, the benchmark does not need to wait for a slower drive when the drives are not the same speed).

 

[Jack Neill]

I just wanted to share some useful information with everyone. I have been following this discussion for some time as I have been experimenting with TB3 NVMe enclosures to use with an Apple computer. I have been using a 2TB WD SN750 in a Samsung X5 enclosure for about a year without a single problem. I just removed a 500GB SSD and installed the WD drive. I recently needed an additional enclosure, so I purchased a Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 1TB USB 3.2 / Thunderbolt 3 External SSD and replaced the 1TB SSD with a second WD SN750 2TB SSD. It was attractive to me because in addition to TB3 speeds one could also have USB 3.2 speeds if needed. I thought folks would be happy to know that it is relatively easy to get inside a Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q, albeit with a little damage and a probable voiding of warranty. You just need to remove the thunderbolt logo circle at the top/back of the drive and it reveals a screw.

I just wanted to share some useful information with everyone. I have been following this discussion for some time as I have been experimenting with TB3 NVMe enclosures to use with an Apple computer. I have been using a 2TB WD SN750 in a Samsung X5 enclosure for about a year without a single problem. I just removed a 500GB SSD and installed the WD drive. I recently needed an additional enclosure, so I purchased a Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 1TB USB 3.2 / Thunderbolt 3 External SSD and replaced the 1TB SSD with a second WD SN750 2TB SSD. It was attractive to me because in addition to TB3 speeds one could also have USB 3.2 speeds if needed. I thought folks would be happy to know that it is relatively easy to get inside a Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q, albeit with a little damage and a probable voiding of warranty. You just need to remove the thunderbolt logo circle at the top/back of the drive and it reveals a screw. After that, SSD replacement is plug and play!

Getting about 2280 MB/s write and 2435 MB/s read from both enclosures with the same WD SN750 SSD.

Let me know if I can answer any questions or assist anyone. Cheers!

View attachment 1768326 View attachment 1768327

I have a Samsung 870 1TB in an X5. I get about 1800. The X5 is a nice little TB enclosure. Easy to take apart and swap drives.

 

[Rock Star]

I'm having great luck with the Fledging Shell Thunder enclosure and an Inland Premium 2TB SSD.

Not only are the speeds great on my 2019 iMac 5k, but the customer service from Fledging was superb. I had an issue with the fan on the one I bought—it's a known issue where the fan gets stuck, and despite following their instructions to free it, mine wouldn't spin up properly. Not only did they immediately ship out a replacement, but I didn't need to return the faulty one (meaning I got to keep the working TB3 cable). Seems like a great company.

It appears to be a bit more expensive than some other options, but the build quality seems terrific and the active cooling keeps the stick cool even under full load—as you can see, it's never even cracked 50° — if only I could say that about my 7200 RPM HDDs!

The speed is nothing record-breaking, but it's more than fast enough for my uses, and outperforms my iMac's internal SSD on synthetic benchmarks.

View attachment 1907583 View attachment 1907589

View attachment 1907592

What happened with the write results of RND4K QD1 and RND4K QD64 of the AmorphousDiskMark bench?

 

[wills11]

What happened with the write results of RND4K QD1 and RND4K QD64 of the AmorphousDiskMark bench?

Not sure what you mean—they're more or less identical to my internal Apple SSD:

 

[Rock Star]

Not sure what you mean—they're more or less identical to my internal Apple SSD:

View attachment 1914876 View attachment 1914875

I notice that the RND4K QD1 for a TB3 external SSD is unusually high (over 40MB/s). The RND4K QD64 for a TB3 external SSD is unusually low (less than 300 MB/s). Both tests are done with Random 4 Kilobyte writes. And the speed test with Queue Depth 1, is faster than the speed test with Queue Depth 64. Or in other words, with a Queue Depth of just 1, AmorphousDiskMark manages to do more IOPS (231.30 x 1024 / 4 = 59212.8 IOPS), than with a Queue Depth of 64 (206.35 x 1024 / 4 = 52825.6 IOPS). Also, the difference between 41.51 MB/s read and 231.30 MB/s write is huge. 41.51 x 1024 / 4 = 10626.56 IOPS vs 59212.8 IOPS. Nearly 6x faster with writing.

 

[joeriggs]

I'm having great luck with the Fledging Shell Thunder enclosure and an Inland Premium 2TB SSD.

Can you transfer 300 GB worth of material and monitor it via istats? I'm curious to see if the speed maintains that speed over that amount of data transfer or does it drop to 700 MB/s

 

[imax05]

hi, can you suggest me a tested ssd enclosure and ssd drive 4tb, that works correctly with M1 max?
tnx

Acasis USB4.0 M.2 Nvme Enclosure 40Gbps Compatible with USB 3.2/3.1/3.0​

+

with Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 980 Pro or ?

It is limited to 2TB correct?

 

[BuckheadDon]

hi, can you suggest me a tested ssd enclosure and ssd drive 4tb, that works correctly with M1 max?
tnx

Acasis USB4.0 M.2 Nvme Enclosure 40Gbps Compatible with USB 3.2/3.1/3.0​

+

with Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 980 Pro or ?

It is limited to 2TB correct?

Trebleet Thunderbolt 3 NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD Enclosure 40Gbps. It seems like this product previously stated that it would work only up to 2TB, but the web page now says "All of our SSD enclosure(s) are tested with SSD(s) up to 4TB and shown no compatibility problem(s)." Interestingly though, the compatibility chart on the same page shows many drives as "Not compatible with MacOS". Some of the other comments in the same chart suggest that there could be a reliance on customer vs in-house testing. I have no personal experience with these, but I'm in the market for an external drive.

 

[imax05]

Trebleet Thunderbolt 3 NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD Enclosure 40Gbps. It seems like this product previously stated that it would work only up to 2TB, but the web page now says "All of our SSD enclosure(s) are tested with SSD(s) up to 4TB and shown no compatibility problem(s)." Interestingly though, the compatibility chart on the same page shows many drives as "Not compatible with MacOS". Some of the other comments in the same chart suggest that there could be a reliance on customer vs in-house testing. I have no personal experience with these, but I'm in the market for an external drive.

I've been searching for hours but haven't found a clear answer,
i think i will go with the acasis and a samsung 980 pro 2TB,
the ideal would be a 4tb but in fact i might have this solution in passing until thunderbolt 4 home comes out, and cheaper 4tb disks..

 

[joeriggs]

I can confirm the Trebleet will work with a 4TB NVME, I have one in there currently.

 

[imax05]

I can confirm the Trebleet will work with a 4TB NVME, I have one in there currently.

which model of nvme 4TB you are using?
which R/W speed? which mac model?

thank you!!!

 

[incumbent]

which model of nvme 4TB you are using?
which R/W speed? which mac model?

thank you!!!

not directed at me but i am not using any pci-e generation 4 devices considering the limitations of the 4m2 enclosure. all four of mine are pci-3 gen3

 

[imax05]

not directed at me but i am not using any pci-e generation 4 devices considering the limitations of the 4m2 enclosure. all four of mine are pci-3 gen3

can you give the name of the models that you are using? thank you!

 

[joeriggs]

which model of nvme 4TB you are using?
which R/W speed? which mac model?

WD Black SN750 - 4 TB model

2019 Intel macbook

Haven't done a speed test with the Trebleet yet.

FYI I care most about "sustained speeds", not burst or random, many NVME write speeds drop off significantly after you write 50-100 GB of data to them, especially if they are QLC.

 

[imax05]

WD Black SN750 - 4 TB model

2019 Intel macbook

Haven't done a speed test with the Trebleet yet.

FYI I care most about "sustained speeds", not burst or random, many NVME write speeds drop off significantly after you write 50-100 GB of data to them, especially if they are QLC.

thank you

 

[incumbent]

can you give the name of the models that you are using? thank you!

sure; i have two Samsung 970 EVO Plus, an ADATA SX8200PNP and one that identifies as merely PCIe SSD Media purchased on Amazon as "Inland Platinum" picked up here:

Inland Platinum 2TB SSD NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0x4 M.2 2280 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive, R/W up to 3,400/3,000 MB/s, PCIe Express 3.1 and NVMe 1.3 Com

I am using these four devices in a dual mirror'ed vdev zpool:

% zpool status -v pool: cascade state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:18:51 with 0 errors on Tue Nov 2 07:57:16 2021 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM cascade ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 media-ADA20CBC-0425-C240-92F0-B5561C66D520 ONLINE 0 0 0 media-91F056E7-163E-CB45-9538-114FCEF1A78B ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 media-38C73A7D-AE0C-9248-A9D4-7FA67B3BBD0B ONLINE 0 0 0 media-08E70174-71F3-6E47-A87F-99020D3A2AB0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors