Sabrent NVMe SSD Enclosure is fast indeed!
With an extra NVMe M.2 SSD lying around, it makes a lot of sense to get an NVMe SSD enclosure to use the SSD as an external disk. But one of the challenge is picking the best performing enclosure! There’s just so many out there. After some deliberation, I decided to go with the Sabrent NVMe SSD Enclosure. TL;DR, I have no regrets picking it up.
The Sabrent NVMe SSD Enclosure
This Sabrent enclosure is a USB Type-C version and is designed to be tool-free to use. It supports any M.2 SSDs as well as both NVMe and SATA interface.
Inside the box, you will find the enclosure itself, a 20cm USB Type-C cable, a little plastic knob for 2260 and 2240 sized SSD and the user manual.
3 reasons why I got the Sabrent enclosure
Firstly, it is designed to be tool-free. No screwdrivers required! All you need to do is to unlatch and flip up the cover and slot in the SSD into the connection port. It’s that simple.
Secondly, it is designed to “sandwich” the SSD, therefore allowing the enclosure to include a thermal pad to cool down the SSD as much as possible. This should mean better thermal management and allow the SSD to perform optimally longer. SSDs does get really hot when it operates.
Lastly, it uses the Realtek RTL9210B chip which definitely supports USB 3.1 GEN2. It is also supposedly the most reliable and best performing chip amongst those regularly used: the JMicron JMS583 and ASMedia ASM2362.
Read also: Upgrade your Intel MacBooks with an External GPU!
Testing the Sabrent SSD enclosure
Paired with the SSD enclosure is my Samsung 960 EVO Series 250GB NVMe SSD which supports sequential read speeds up to 3200MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 1900MB/s. Thus, it is faster than what the RTL9210B chip can push through, which is good for my test.
I generally think that disk performance benchmarks are quite useless. There are too many different factors that affects real life read and write performance. However, it is still useful for purposes of checking the if the SSD enclosure is able to perform as advertised. For that, I used Blackmagicdesign’s Disk Speed Test to see what is the fastest sequential read and write speeds of the enclosure.
As you can see in the screenshot above, it really does come close to the 1GB/s speeds which USB 3.1 GEN 2 (aka USB 3.2) supports. You do have to ensure your PC supports USB 3.1 GEN 2, which my MacBook Pro does, in order to get this level of performance. If on USB 3.1 GEN 1 you would see half the performance since it supports only up to 5Gbit/s bandwidth.
You will also notice that the enclosure gets pretty hot during use. This is actually good since that means the heat from the SSD is getting transferred to the aluminium case of the enclosure.
All in all, the Sabrent NVMe SSD enclosure is a great option if you are looking to get one yourself.
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