Wavlink Thunderdrive One TB3 enclosure problems (Samsung 970 EVO Plus)

[Fomalhaut]

I just bought the first generation Wavlink TB3 NVMe SSD enclosure on Amazon thinking it would be a good match for my Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD. I was wrong! This seems to be unusable on my Apple Silicon Macs.

The SSD was working fantastically well on a PCIe carrier board inside a desktop PC that I've just sold - read/write both over 3000MB/s on PCIe 3. Great, I thought, I'll buy a TB3/4 enclosure for my M1 Macs and it will fly....

It was initially formatted NTFS, and I use Paragon NTFS which mounted the drive, but could not read data. So I reformatted to APFS and tried again. Same problem. Tried HFS+...same. Tried running Apple Disk Utility repair....just hung. Then it would spontaneously disconnect, and not reconnect at all. I don't know if the drive is actually still working at this point, but can't test on my spare Windows PC because that doesn't have TB3. I may have to buy a USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure to test it and run Samsung diagnostics (which is Windows only).

I was able to run BlackMagic drive test for writes (but not reads), and the results were a bit disappointing at about 1400MB/s.

The drive also runs incredibly hot, which may be normal (I never measured temperature inside the PC case).

So a few questions:

(1) Does anyone have one of these gen 1 Wavlink enclosures (this one: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B09L3X2NDS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

If so, does it work with your Apple Silicon Mac, and which SSD are you using?

(2) Are there known issues with the Samsung 970 EVO Plus with Macs or MacOS? I have seen some people say it has issues.

It seems that external Thunderbolt enclosures and SSD are still a hit-and-miss affair...<sigh>

I now need to decide whether to try a different brand of NVMe SSD, or to return the Wavlink enclosure.

Thoughts?

 

[TUD6]

Did you try formatting the drive to extFAT? I have wavelink TB3 enclousre with 1TB WD black ssd. It works fine with extFAT on both PC and Mac with TB3/4 port. I also have intel base and Apple silicone MacBook Pro 16s. Both work fine the the drive formatted as extFAT.

 

[Sarpanch]

While I don’t have experience with this specific Wavlink enclosure, but Samsung 970 Evo Plus is notorious for slow write speeds on almost all Thunderbolt 3 chipsets. I believe it has something to do with the controller that is used by Samsung.

Surprisingly, the original 970 Evo works fine (and 960 as well). There are a few threads here at MR with forum members having success with Jeyi (Thunderbolt 3), or Acasis (USB/Thunderbolt 4) enclosures with PCIE 3 SSDs other than 970 Evo Plus.

 

[Gnattu]

It sounds like an enclosure issue because 970 Evo Plus works(although slower than it should be) in other enclosures.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Did you try formatting the drive to extFAT? I have wavelink TB3 enclousre with 1TB WD black ssd. It works fine with extFAT on both PC and Mac with TB3/4 port. I also have intel base and Apple silicone MacBook Pro 16s. Both work fine the the drive formatted as extFAT.

Thanks, but the SSD didn’t even format in exFAT. I’ve ordered a USB 3.2 enclosure to test the SSD and I can run some diagnostics on it from a Windows machine.

There is a possibility of upgrading the firmware of the TB3 enclosure if I run a Windows VM on an Intel Mac or a PC with a TB3 port

 

[Earl Urley]

I have this WavLink enclosure and while the firmware install procedure is a little involved (it involves installing an unsourced version of Python on the PC and then using that to run the updater which is likely written using Python) you only need to run it once..

And I just looked at the website and it looks like they removed the firmware... yeesh.

The product is still listed on the site but it seems they don't want to bother providing any further support for it.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I have this WavLink enclosure and while the firmware install procedure is a little involved (it involves installing an unsourced version of Python on the PC and then using that to run the updater which is likely written using Python) you only need to run it once..

And I just looked at the website and it looks like they removed the firmware... yeesh.

The product is still listed on the site but it seems they don't want to bother providing any further support for it.

Thanks. This looks like it may be heading into the “too difficult box”, and I might have to return the item to Amazon and do more research on enclosures and compatible SSDs.

 

[Earl Urley]

The update did help with the constant unmounting issues I had with an Intel Mac and the UTE-02, but I still had issues whenever I tried to do a clone to the drive, and that was to a supposedly compatible Kingston NVMe SSD.

The issues went away when I switched the NVMe to a Cube TB3 enclosure, so I relegated the UTE-02 to a shelf.

 

[Fomalhaut]

The update did help with the constant unmounting issues I had with an Intel Mac and the UTE-02, but I still had issues whenever I tried to do a clone to the drive, and that was to a supposedly compatible Kingston NVMe SSD.

The issues went away when I switched the NVMe to a Cube TB3 enclosure, so I relegated the UTE-02 to a shelf.

Thanks for that. It looks the I made the wrong call with the Wavlink enclosure, particularly as the UTE-01 firmware is no longer available on their website. I'm going to send it back to Amazon.

 

[Fomalhaut]

[UPDATE:] I've just received a Sabrent USB 3.2 NVMe/SATA enclosure and tested it with the Samsung 970 EVO Plus.

(1) The SSD still works fortunately! I was worried that the Wavlink enclosure had killed it somehow

(2) The Sabrent enclosure is super easy to use without requiring any screws or tools. It also seems to keep the SSD quite cool even after extensive benchmarking, file copies or playback of large video files

(3) I get a respectable 990MB/s write and 945MB/s read on my MBP 14", when connected directly via the CalDigit TB3 dock. Read speed drops to 905MB/s when connected directly to the MacBook (I have seen improved speeds via the CalDigit dock with other SSDs and I expect it is because the connection from computer to dock is via Thunderbolt, and the connection to the SSD uses the dock's USB 3.2 implementation which is faster than the MacBook's)

(4) These speeds are still considerably better than the Samsung T7 NVMe (USB 3.2) drives that I also have, so this is a positive outcome.

(5) I'm going to wait to jump on Thunderbolt enclosures again until I need a substantial jump in SSD storage capacity or speed. I already have 3 x 512GB and 5 x 1TB external SSDs, which are mainly used for video and photo projects, so it probably won't be a while before I need more storage. Hopefully by then, TB3/4 compatibility issues will have improved

Thanks to everyone who answered!

 

[jwahaus]

Just curious, how much of a speed increase (if any) do you get when running your Samsung T7 from your CalDigit dock as opposed to plugging it directly into the MBP? I typically get around 750MB/s from my 2TB Samsung T7's when directly plugged into the computer.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Just curious, how much of a speed increase (if any) do you get when running your Samsung T7 from your CalDigit dock as opposed to plugging it directly into the MBP? I typically get around 750MB/s from my 2TB Samsung T7's when directly plugged into the computer.

i’ll check again for you, but IIRC it was somewhere between 50-100MB/s difference.

 

[Fomalhaut]

i’ll check again for you, but IIRC it was somewhere between 50-100MB/s difference.

For 1GB files:
via CalDigit TB3 dock: write 820MB/s, read 750MB/s
direct to MBP14: 820MB/s, 725MB/s

For 5GB files:
via CalDigit TB3 dock: write 650-690MB/s, read 720MB/s
direct to MBP14: 700-720MB/s, 690MB/s

So actually not as big a difference as I remember. reads are slightly faster on the dock, and writes on average are the same or a bit slower. They is a lot of variation in write speed between test runs.