
And the enclosure is made to be hot-swappable, allowing you to plug and play the drive without installing drivers, or otherwise going into more involved stages of configuration. This enclosure is also backwards compatible for Gen1 and USB 3.0, though when using those formats, you also invoke their speed limits. In other words, a great way to take advantage of most NVMe drives. That allows transmission speeds which reach out towards 10Gbps. Internally you’ll find support for a USB 3.1 Gen2 Port. The Sabrent USB Type-C Aluminum Enclosure uses a fairly smart and simple design. Sabrent USB Type-C Aluminum Enclosure for M.2 NVMe SSD These extras can be useful to watch for, especially if you have a drive which runs particularly hot. They might offer cooling vents, or special thermal pads. When you take care of your drive with reasonable temperatures, you may get years of extra life from it.Īpart from the material used in the chassis, some of the best USB Type-C enclosures for M.2 NVMe SSD drives go out of their way to dissipate heat in other ways. Managing that heat is essential to ensuring the longevity of the drive and your data.
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Sticking your NVMe drive inside of a tiny box and pumping it full of electricity will create heat. The relationship between electronics and heat is pretty well established. But using the right enclosure, your drive would survive those kind of blows with little more than a dent. You certainly wouldn’t want to strike even the best USB Type-C enclosures with a hammer. Using a metallic chassis doesn’t just bring a more attractive design and effective heat dissipation, it can also provide physical protection for your drive and its data. It doesn’t hurt that aluminum is cheap, either.

Aluminum has magnificent thermal properties, making it excellent at dissipating heat. NVMe drives don’t consume terribly high amounts of power, but they do tend to heat up when you use them. But short of that, you almost certainly want to make use of aluminum. If you were expecting your drive to endure horrible abuse, then you might consider some alternative materials. They look complex, but once you know your drive will fit inside, you don’t need to get lost inside these kind of details. The names for each format are relatively undescriptive 4-digit codes, like 2260 or 2280. Enclosures makes this relatively simple by specifying the type of form factors which they support. You need the enclosure to match-up to the drive placed inside of it. Form FactorĪnother issue adjacent to compatibility is the physical form of the enclosure itself. If you are using a more obscure or unpopular drive, then you’ll need to pay more attention to the form factor of the enclosure itself. To summarize, if you’re using one of the Samsung 950PRO or 960Evo series, you’ll have no problem finding what you want. That makes compatibility considerations far simpler because unless you’re using an incredibly obscure or unpopular NVMe SSD, finding the right enclosure will prove rather simple. And among the ones who do, there are really only a handful of different products. There aren’t that many manufacturers that make M.2 NVMe drives. But it also ensures your enclosure is all but certain to not support SATA based connections. Choosing a USB Type-C enclosure narrows down your selection quickly. These keys allow for a particular type of connection, like USB, SATA, DisplayPort, and so on. Different M.2 modules make use of different keys. For example, you want to ensure the enclosure supports the right keys for your drive. You want to ensure some basic things about compatibility. It’s a bit like running a sports car with watered down gasoline, and it’s terribly easy to avoid. Having slightly inferior internal connections, it’s easy for an otherwise fast NVMe SSD to be throttled by as much as 20%. You want to be certain your drive will fit inside, and the enclosure won’t use connections which throttle your bandwidth.


Choosing the Best USB Type-C Enclosure for M.2 NVMe SSDįinding a great enclosure is actually pretty simple.
