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  • RoC_17 - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Thanks for this review, a niche category which I had my eyes upon for a while.

    Still, I would prefer to have an alternative mounting mechanism for the SSD inside the enclosure for better thermal handling.

    Sliding in means that attaching thermal pads is not possible, but thermals surely would benefit from that. Why not have a top cover with 4 low profile screws for exactly that reason?
  • woggs - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Bingo. I bought one but really need to ensure a solid thermal connection from the controller on the drive to the case or it will overheat. I ended up not using the case that came with it and bought a separate M.2 heatsink kit with proper thermal adhesive to make solid contact to the asic on the drive. Now it works great.
  • woggs - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    To be clear, I tried the original case and the drive hung (thermal shut down) during sustained writes....
  • Clarkage - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    The instructions show a thermal pad that's to be installed on top of the drive before sliding it in. Did your case have this / did you use it ? I'm certainly not convinced that's it's sufficient heat sinking but was curious about your particular situation.
    Also, what drive was it? [just curious]
  • woggs - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Well crap. I did not get one (or I've forgotten already).
  • weevilone - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Mine came with the thermal interface, but it was so sticky that I couldn't slide the enclosure over the drive with the material in place.
  • weevilone - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Can you share what you wound up using? I sent mine back after failing to get the included thermal interface to work with the sliding case.
  • jabber - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    I need to get one of this type of adapter for testing and build cloning. Currently having to use a PCI-e card and it's a pain.
  • Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    What excites me is that now I can easily clone my laptop's NVMe SSD to a new one before upgrading the SSD, without having to do a bunch of workarounds (like finding a desktop with multiple M.2, or cloning to SATA as a middleman).
  • SonnyCrockett84 - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Which is exactly what I did with my Dell XPS 15 9575 2in1, went from a 256 to a 512. I bought mine from Aliexpress on September 13th, though, 32 bucks, from JEYI, took a couple of weeks to get here, no biggie. Here's the link https://www.aliexpress.com/item/-/32874418125.html
  • SonnyCrockett84 - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    By the way, the clone works flawlessly, I think the whole process using Acronis 2019 took 10 minutes, if that.
  • oRAirwolf - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    I ordered one of these as soon as I saw the announcement that these were available in the news section. I have been using it with a Toshiba xg4 512gb SSD. It gets really hot to the touch, but the speeds are very impressive. Definitely worth the money.
  • amouses - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    I really just don't get it. To me it does not matter how fast it is, if it can't replace a standard USB key it is bl***y useless. By that I mean it needs to have a retractable USB end, i.e. it MUST NOT NEED any cable. Because otherwise it's just a complete pain to use. Until this design improves I'd recommend the Silverstone MS09
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    This is not a thumb drive, and is not intended to replace one. It's the modern equivalent to an external HDD.

    Once something gets beyond the size of a thumb drive, I don't want it directly plugged into a port. Because it's wider than typical port spacing it's going to be blocking adjacent ports. It looks like it's thick enough that on many really thin laptops it'd be lifting them up off the table. On anything where it's hanging it's going to be putting a lot more torque on the port itself than normal increasing the risks of mechanical failure.
  • PushT - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link

    Not intended to be one ? Who do you represent ? I would say that regardless of this being an external drive, people would want as simple a solution as possible. Do you think 60-70 grams would lift a laptop off of the table ?
  • Clarkage - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    The MS09 will never work, it does SATA not PCIe...
  • Targon - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Many people who fix computers for others have needed these for a while. The goal is NOT about replacing your typical flash drive, but more so that you can pull the drive from a dead computer/laptop and get the data off of it. If your current workstation does not have a NVMe slot, or if there is only one and you want to get data off another, what do you do?
  • Synomenon - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Ordered this one yesterday morning:
    www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GNZSN3R/

    Based on the JMS583 as well. My desktop bit the dust recently and I had been looking for a way to retrieve the data from my 950 Pro..
  • Arbie - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Thanks for the very thorough discussion, which clearly took a lot of work. These are the kinds of interesting devices that rarely receive such attention.
  • Shark321 - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    If you but a Bitlocker encrypted drive into a case with the JMS583 controller very weird things will happen. The partition size will be wrong. Data loss is inevitable.
  • peterfares - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    I got one of these, it is pretty nice other than it's a bit hard to slide in the drive with the heat pad on it. I got it to be able to pull an NVMe drive out of a computer to read it externally, and because I had a spare 256GB M.2 drive from a computer I upgraded.
  • repoman27 - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    "...the enclosure along with the SSD must stay within the minimum guaranteed USB 2.0 power delivery envelop (900mA @ 5V, corresponding to 4.5W)."

    Not sure if that's an error or just a typo, but Vbus for USB 2.0 only offers 500 mA @ 5 V, which is 2.5 W. What you quoted is for USB 3.x, and your power measurements more or less bear that out.

    Seeing as this is a USB Type-C device, it would be nice if they included a port controller that supported USB Type-C Current. This would allow the drive to draw up to 1.5 A (similar to USB Battery Charging 1.2) or 3.0 A at 5 V if those levels were advertised by the host / upstream port, without the expense of implementing USB Power Delivery. Many ports already support USB BC 1.2, and 7.5 W would be sufficient for most SSD's, and certainly 15 W would be plenty once Type-C Current becomes more common. Dissipating more than 7.5 W with an enclosure that size probably wouldn't be happening though.

    These types of bridges look like they're positioned to become the mainstay of affordable, high-performance, external storage. A version that supported USB Type-C current and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbit/s) along with a well engineered thermal solution would be brilliant.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Thank you very much for pointing out the error. I have added a few updates in that section clarifying the 2.5W vs. 4.5W power envelop, and how it affects this particular enclosure.
  • vailr - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Aliexpress offers similar NVMe enclosures with the JMS583 controller chip. "JEYI" and "XT-XINTE" are two brand names offered there, at prices beginning at ~$22 including shipping, direct from China. I have the JEYI branded item, which works ok with a Samsung 960 EVO NVMe drive. Can be configured as a bootable external "Windows to Go" drive. Much faster than a typical USB 3.0 thumb drive.
  • colinstalter - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    I've been wanting to design a three-SSD Thunderbolt 3-based drive. This is a pretty cool product.
  • netmann - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link

    Nice review!
    Simple question: can you use this enclosure as a Windows 10 boot drive? If not, why?
  • vailr - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Yes, Windows can be configured as a bootable external "Windows to Go" drive. Rufus is one example of free software which allows installation of Windows on an external USB device from a standard installation .iso file.
  • netmann - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link

    Thanks. But checking Refus website reveals it only works on USB flash drives (thumb drives) and not on USB external SSD or HDD...
  • vailr - Sunday, November 11, 2018 - link

    The Rufus website may be outdated.
    I'm certain that it does work for preparing a "Windows to Go" boot drive. "Windows to Go" is one of the Rufus menu options, which can be used to prepare a bootable USB thumb drive, a bootable USB 3.0 or USB-C external SSD, spinning hard drive, or what have you. However, you cannot simply install Windows on an external USB drive while the system was booted from a normal Windows installation media.
  • akvadrako - Monday, November 12, 2018 - link

    Not really. It only works for Win2Go, which isn't the same as a full install.

    It is possible to install Windows on a normal drive and make a sector-by-sector clone, but it requires a fair bit of tinkering and isn't supported.
  • Impulses - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Is there anything like this which would work with an M.2 AHCI but PCI-E drive? I realize that's a rarity, but I have a first gen SM951 that I'd like to use externally... Seems all the current bridges are made for SATA M.2 drives or strictly NVMe, and I'm guessing the SM951 won't play nice with either.
  • mapesdhs - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    Typo I reckon...

    "... since the bottleneck fot shifted to the SSD side."

    I think you meant "got", but that's bad writing btw, just say, "... bottleneck moved to the SSD."

    And on the last page, "... consumers around 700 mW when active."

    I like the look of this device. Alas no sign of it in the UK yet.
  • Dug - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link

    I wish someone would make a 2-4 small box for NVMe with thunderbolt and no raid controller to keep costs down.
  • PushT - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link

    There are two very important aspects to these enclosures imo. The thermal aspect and what the enclosure will be used for.
    I think you are skipping an important point when choosing the drive for these tests. When people use a usb device like this they usually want high reliable SUSTAINED transfer speeds. THAT is actually more important than burst speeds with crappy TLC drives. I mimicked your photo/video transfer tests with an MLC oem drive(whaaat??), and I blew the socks off your usb 3.1 gen 2 results using usb 3.1 gen 1(usb 3.0). You know why ? Because the sustained read/ write speeds of my internal & external m.2's do not depend on cache. So why use a high quality drive you say ? Because the native speed of TLC will have you throwing your adapter out the freaking window ....
    I bought a jms583 bridge pcb cheaply, without enclosure, and I would(of course!) like to use it as a memory stick. Who wouldn't ? The remaining part of the puzzle is the enclosure, because as testing and experience shows, throttling does occur.
  • PushT - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link

    Just to be clear, when talking about sustained transfer rates in these kind of situations, I don't mean 10 GB. My trials were done with 100+ GB's , at which point you would return to native speeds of TLC, while I would retain high speeds. To put it into perspective( and I have already tried several m.2 enclosures with both sata and name); It's no good to me if your "testing" reveals that I could potentially get a burst speed of 1TB at some point during the file transfer e.g. I think most people actually would be content with "Sata speed", as long as that speed is sustained through the transfer. ~550 MB/s sustained, I would take that all day over burst speed for 30 seconds + 15-20 minutes for the rest of the file transfer.
  • PushT - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link

    I am sorry to post multiple times here, but I do not want people to be mislead. Please read the page that I link to here, it is indeed a review done by anandtech, and it shows by numbers essentially how putting a 2-lane, low-end TLC drive into your DIY enclosure will leave you disappointed when in real life use. A sustained 349/256 MB/s read/write sequential speed would not even satisfy you on a sata bridge, so choose wisely when picking your m.2 drive. My suggestion would definitely be an mlc oem drive.
  • PushT - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/12538/the-mydigital...
  • Sailor23M - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link

    Thanks for the heads up, I just bought one of these and looking to pair it with a drive.
  • PushT - Wednesday, March 20, 2019 - link

    Haha... That was a good one I must admit. Rather than 1TB I would have like to have written 1GB/s.

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