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Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosures
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I believe shipping should be imminent as my credit card just got debited today. I had pre-ordered mine in late June.
This is strange...
I received yesterday by email the invoice as well as the USPS tracking number.
I actually pre-ordered via Mac Sales.
My credit card was billed yesterday and I have received a USPS tracking number. I suspect the delay is for those who have just ordered. I pre-ordered in June or July when the first announcement was made.
Yottamaster enclosure (Intel JHL6340 PCB with the green LED) with Samsung 970Pro 1TB
No SLC cache hence speeds are continous at 78°C max
Best combi for speed I can imagine.
![Samsung 970Pro Acasis_.png]( "Samsung 970Pro Acasis_.png")
Nice enclosure from Acasis here (despite review works nicely)
Samsung 960Pro 2TB reached only 800MB/s write in any JHL6340 enclosure I tested
Thanks for all your infos.
Cheers
No SLC cache hence speeds are continous at 78°C max
Best combi for speed I can imagine.
Nice enclosure from Acasis here (despite review works nicely)
Samsung 960Pro 2TB reached only 800MB/s write in any JHL6340 enclosure I tested
Thanks for all your infos.
Cheers
In macOS 10.15.6, on Mac mini 2018, using AmorphousDiskMark 2.5.5:Samsung 960Pro 2TB reached only 800MB/s write in any JHL6340 enclosure I tested
My Samsung SSD 960 Pro 1TB is similar. 2607MB/s read, 856MB/s write.
My Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512MB: 2598MB/s read, 1041MB/s write.
These are in a Thunderbolt enclosure behind two PCIe switches (Sonnet Echo Express III-D and Amfeltec gen 3 four M.2 carrier card).
Yep, definitely something is wrong with this "older" 960Pro series for use in an TB enclosure. I was digging into fw versions (960Pro had an recalled fw). I'm using 2B6QCXP7. Maybe it's NVMe Version v1.2 vs v1.3 on newer 970Pro? I tested drivers (Microsoft/Samsung 3.3), enclosures (Acasis/Yottamaster/TEKQ Cube), cables (Caldigit/Cablematters), windows write cache and eventually gave up on the 960Pro 2TB and I am still using it internally in my ThinkPad. Well that's still a heck of a drive to be dissapointed with
There's a Firmware utility for JHL6340 (Wavlink UTE02) but that's above my knowledge at the moment.
If anybody has an idea, I would gladly test it furthermore
There's a Firmware utility for JHL6340 (Wavlink UTE02) but that's above my knowledge at the moment.
If anybody has an idea, I would gladly test it furthermore
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It’s probably because mine is coming from the reseller in the UK.
I only cancelled my preorder at MacSales because it was going to cost 2 x the price I could get it in the UK (after delivery, UK taxes & admin fees) - it just wasn’t listed on the UK reseller’s website for a while.
I don't have Windows installed, but mimicking the Crystal vs Amorphous benchmarks from mackiemesser2's results, I think I'm pretty happy with the Sabrent now (and the Orico enclosure) after going into a girly panic before. Especially when compared to the soldered Apple SSD. Not enough of a speed difference to even notice it in everyday use.
![Screenshot 2020-09-18 at 01.28.00.png]( "Screenshot 2020-09-18 at 01.28.00.png")
Your aforementioned inconsistent benchmark results could be because of the SLC cache is full
I'll therefore choose MLC over TLC or QLC anytime.
But if you're not writing more than 16GB at a time (this is the amount the SLC cache can buffer) and you're happy with the speed of the Sabrent all is fine.
Cheers
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Did you by chance format the 960Pro 1TB in the enclosure before testing? Could this be a misalignement or wrong sector size?
These numbers are killer, especially with one of the reports using the Orico enclosure (like mine). With my XPG SX8200, I’m getting around 1GB/s read/write which is good, but not great.
Can’t wait to see the results of the OWC enclosure which is on its way. Might need to upgrade to a Samsung stick.
Can’t wait to see the results of the OWC enclosure which is on its way. Might need to upgrade to a Samsung stick.
It's the combination of a decent JHL6340 enclosure (Acasis/Yottamaster/Trebleet/Orico all us the same PCB afaik) and an MLC SSD (Samsung 970Pro). Forget about TLC or QLC. They all have SLC cache. Once this cache is full read and write speeds are reduced drastically. No other way around with SLC. Not to mention lesser TBW and lifetime on those drives.
Still not worth it. (and the data on the Sabrent is backed up on 2 different drives - it has a 5 year warranty as well).
The read and write speeds obtained in the video (1250MB/s read, 950MB/s write) are not very impressive. According to the XPG website, this NVMe SSD is capable of a theoretical 3500MB/s read and a 3000MG/s write (though "real life" speeds will be lower). I bought a 2TB Sabrent Rocket Pro NVMe SSD that advertises slightly slower speeds (3400 read/2750 write) and put it into a USB-C (NOT Thunderbolt 3) enclosure, and using the same testing software (Black Magic Disk Speed Test) got results comparable to what the OWC Envoy Express got in this video.
This is one of the inherent flaws of SSD benchmarks. The SLC cache limitation often does not play in real world scenarios.
Same with CPU benchmarks, there are precious few situations where I have an extended multi-threaded workload on my CPU. A Handbrake encode might be the only one for me.
I have both a Sabrent Rocket PCIe Gen4 m.2 SSD and the ADATA XPG 8200 PCIe Gen3 m.2 SSD on a B550 motherboard (which supports Gen4). The only time I can push the Gen3 stick is when I copy a very large file from the Gen4 stick. That rarely happens since I'm using the Gen3 stick as a game library; most of the drive activity are disk reads.
The Gen4 stick is my Windows 10 boot drive. Naturally as a boot drive, write performance is quite important but again I don't need sustained write performance with humongous files.
I also have a Gen3 Sabrent Rocket m.2 stick in a cheapo $25 USB-C enclosure. I'm satisfied with its daily performance.
My goal was to build the most reliable, fastest and smallest external Thunderbolt3 drive one can get at this point in time. If you think "Photography" you get the idea. Time and reliablility is money. I learned the importance of reliability the hard way (about 20 years ago). Never going the "should work ok" way again since. At some point the hardware pays for itself.
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@mackiemesser2 that's a lovely looking enclosure, but not that compact.. Looks unecessarily wide? Is it available anywhere? I guess it shares the same board as most of the others we've been talking about?
D.
D.
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You can find the eclosure here (as already stated above):
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