Review on M 2 External Converter Adapter Enclosure by Joshua Paulson

So, a bit of background. Since the Raspberry Pi 4 now supports booting from external USB drives, I tried using a good quality Samsung USB stick (one of the keychains) and while it was faster than a micro SD card, it tended to , getting very hot and slowing down over time. After using this setup for a few months, the flash drive failed. In hindsight I think that makes sense as these flash drives weren't really designed for continuous use and lots of random writes. Luckily I had a USB 3 external hard drive dock that I haven't used recently. So I connected it together with an old hard drive I had laying around. This setup worked really well. The speed was amazing compared to micro SD or USB stick settings. The downside was a slightly noisy and power-hungry rotary drive that hummed on the table all the time. I wanted to run an SSD solution and chose the M.2 form factor to save a lot of space. I found an Argon ONE M.2 enclosure and ordered it along with a fairly cheap M.2 SATA SSD. While the SSD (ordered from Revain) arrived quickly, the Argon case seemed like it would take some time, so I decided to buy this case to use while I waited for the case to arrive. I have to say it works as expected, the performance of even cheap SSDs really shows the potential of the Raspberry Pi 4! You'd be surprised how many micro SD cards can clog your Pi. I found the installation to be smooth for the most part, but I will say that the lack of documentation with the case is definitely a downside. There weren't any, but if you have a little experience installing M.2 drives, you shouldn't have too much trouble. The quality of the materials seems reasonable given the price. Usage couldn't be easier: Plug and Play! I've tested it on Windows and Pi and it worked equally well on both. Throughput has been amazing compared to my other solutions, but I haven't had a chance to do anything in terms of benchmarks yet. I've seen almost 200MB/s in a large file write test on the Pi, but I can't say if this is typical as much depends on the drive installed, OS, etc. In theory, the case should offer about three times high speed with the right equipment. I have another Pi that I will be using this case with once the Argon case arrives (which ironically shipped the day after I ordered it) and when I decommission this unit I'm sure this case will come in handy for Travel or other mobile applications. Overall I am very satisfied with this product.