Re: Insigniatm - M.2 Nvme To Usb-c Ssd Enclosure
Ania Cozzolino
We have used external NVMe to USB-C 3.2 Gen2 enclosures before for random SSD-drives and have had reasonable experience with them. Usually the use has been read heavy when doing data recovery from a dead laptop and transferring files over to a new machine.
The enclosures we tested:
Two different m.2 m-key to USB-C 3.2 gen2 enclosures capable of 1GB/s sustained transfers - Bought from Ali Express - Tested with various cables including 10cm USB-C to USB-C and 30cm Thunderbolt3 certified oem-docking station cables
When testing we ruled out overheating as an issue by applying extra heatsinks to the drives as well as the enclosure controllers. My guess is that this is simply a firmware issue where the new high performance and high capacity SSDdrives do not perform well in these kind of enclosures.
When testing with a Win PC I used Crystal disk info to read smart values from the drive and never got temps over 72C. Also we did try to run the case open and stuck a heatsink on the drive and the USB converter controller chip.
Most drives will report up to three temperatures, with one being roughly 10C higher. I would have to assume that one is the controller. If CrystalDisk is reporting the average or NAND temps, then your controller could be hitting 80C+ and that is definitely thermal throttle territory.
How do you find the luck in what you are getting being good from AliExpress? I just find it hard to trust those websites when I look at the pricing compared to what I know the equivalent legit item would cost.
Also, paradoxically, it is actually a good sign if the case gets warm or even hot. If it stays cool, it probably does not have contact to the drive, and the drive is cooking inside with nowhere to dump the heat. The air inside will be a quite good insulator!
It is true that there is a large variance in the quality of products sold on Ali and similar sites. End of the day, most tech comes from china and most new tech is able to be bought from there a significant time before it is available anywhere else. These usb-c NVME enclosures are a good example. They have been available for years and are now beginning to be sold widely in western outlets.
While continuing the testing I found out that Additional cooling and larger heatsinks actually do make a difference. The ones I tried earlier did not do the trick so now I tried with some larger ones and the drive is managing to keep cool and function for the whole 200GB test transfer at expected speeds reaching 53C at the end.
Tested the transfers with large 12GB image files that I had in my downloads folder that were aroung 6 months old. The files could be read at a very slow 20-70MB/s speed from an internal 4TB Gen 4 SSD with trim enabled. Other files would read at 2-4GB/s data rates no problem but specific downloaded images were extremely slow for some reason.
If you were to redo your testing slotted in onboards slots, I would bet they would behave similarly. The final steady state would likely be better performing, but there would be massive perf drop anyway.
What comes to the Crucial performance it was extremely poor compared to the kingston drive. Crucial falls of to around 70-100MB/s after roughly 20-30 sec at 1GB/s and the kingston drive seems to be able to sustain 1GB/s speeds for at least the first 900GB.
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