UGREEN M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure Adapter

Solid design, looks great, works great. But the speed advertised is no where near the actual speed. The best I got in CrystalDisk after playing with setting for about an hour was 30MBps read, after using a M.2 that got 3100MBps while installed in a PC. I used two machines and the speed is atrocious - my spinning HDD external is 5 times faster (literally) than this enclosure.

Got this to make my own DIY external hard drive at the fraction of the cost of pre-built ones in retail stores. Added a 2TB Hynix gen3 NVMe SSD, and I'm getting decent read and write speeds for a 10Gbps enclosure. It's not running the full TB3 or TB4, so the observed reduced speeds are understandable. It comes with a thermal strip to reduce heating and thus, increase read and write speeds (see comparison pictures). Overall, this is an inexpensive case that keeps up with premium build quality, performance, and durability.

Pros: It works great. First time use was a breeze. My system recognized the drive, and I could use it like any other external drive. Cons: The lock down tab at the full-length slot is a little close to the edge of the enclosure and difficult to manage if you have big hands. A good set of tweezers or needle noise pliers will help elevate that issue. Shorter modules don't have this issue and can be installed by hand.

Testing disks in external enclosures is always tricky because so much depends on your windows configuration. If you run a "disk benchmark" like crystal disk mark you will usually get much higher speeds than if you try something more "real world" like copying a large folder full of files. This is mostly because of how windows works. The way the source and destination disk is formatted and the speed of your CPU and hardware can make a difference. For this test I put a 256gb M.2 NVME drive in the enclosure that was rated for at least 2000MB/second. I used a USB 3.2 port on my computer for the test. The source drive for the video copies was a 2tb M2 SSD on the computer motherboard which is rated over 3000MB/sec. The tests I did were copying a 100gb Unreal Engine project (a mix of large, small and medium files) and copying an 80gb folder full of mostly very large video files. Copying the big files ran at about 600MB/second. The unreal engine copy peaked at about the same speed, but slowed down when smaller files were being copied. This is about the best speed I have seen for any kind of USB SSD on my system. I suspect if you were using it for a more normal workload, like a scratch disk for photoshop, video editing or playing games, the performance would be better as Windows file copies are known not to be that efficient. After about 20 minutes of mixed testing, the drive did not seem to get hot. Installing the SSD into the enclosure was very easy and took about a minute. One thing which is a little confusing is they ask you to stick a foam pad to the SSD. I'm really not sure of the purpose of this pad, if it was thermal material it seems pointless because it doesn't actually touch the metal case. Maybe it is just to help hold the SSD in place? In any case, this enclosure + an M2 ssd seeks to be a good way to get a high capacity and fast external SSD that is small and easy to carry. This combination is way faster than other "one piece" external thumb drives I've tested.

An easy to use, well made M.2 SSD Enclosure. It works well at good speeds. M.2 drive was easy to install in this enclosure. It even looks good. :-) I am very happy with this enclosure. I give it 5 stars.

Able to reach data transfers up to 951 mb/s, on par with the expected performance of the RTL9210B chip.

I tested this and SSK enclosure with a 2TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus NVMe drive and this enclosure perform as desire, which has 900MB+ read and write performance on a 10GB file, on both USB-C to C and USB-C to A cables. So if want speed, which is why I think you're building a portable NVMe SSD drive, this is the one to buy.

The design is nice and easy to install an NVME drive. Works as intended.

I like that this is completely tool-less. It's easy to pop open and access the drive. There's no heat dissipation mechanism though so drives do get hot.