Review on 💻 ORICO Aluminum M.2 NVME & SATA SSD Enclosure – USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C 10Gbps by Paul Green

This device appears to be the perfect M.2 enclosure: RTL9210B chip supporting NVME and SATA SSDs (supports all relevant M.2 connector keys). USB Type-C with 3.1 Gen 2 support, a good mounting mechanism, and a fairly efficient (and pretty) heatsink enclosure. They even give you 2 different high quality cables: C-to-C and C-to-A. The chassis kept my SSD from 35°C idle to around 55°C under sustained load. a little warm, but overall it would be ok for an external device designed primarily for bulk transfers and backups. sustained transfer rates regularly reach 280 MB/s (Gen 1). My SATA M.2 SSD maxed out at 330MB/s compared to Gen 2. However, after I replaced my first device, the second device had the exact same problem. After some time the performance of the chassis drops sharply (usually to KB/s or zero). Disk write errors/failures show up in the Windows event logs and the device does not recover until it is disconnected/reconnected. it then often repeats itself after just a few minutes of data transfer. I've tried every troubleshooting method: every USB port (via a hub, front and back motherboard), different cables, multiple computers, updating my chipset drivers, updating my motherboard BIOS, updating my SSD firmware. everything I could imagine. Conclusion: The case design doesn't seem to be able to cope with the thermal requirements, even with moderately long use. It looks like even the much cooler RTL9210B bridge chip will still overheat using this design. I came to this conclusion for several reasons: 1) The bridge chip gets warm with prolonged high power use. At first glance, it only seems that the SSD is heating up, but if you open the housing directly after a long transfer, you will immediately notice that the housing electronics may be getting too hot. 2) The device has never had problems with USB 2.0 transmission. long transfers at USB 2.0 speeds (30-50MB/s) do not cause a problem.3) Short, high-speed transfers rarely cause problems. almost never if the device has been idle/disconnected from the network for a while. 4) The issue was significantly delayed by better thermal testing: placing a square of the included silicone thermal pad on the controller noticeably delayed the issue. Gluing the entire device to an aluminum block (for manufacturing; long story) delayed the problem for several hours under high loads (and on a hot day). In summary, for use cases, this case works reliably for the most part. where it is necessary to transfer short packets of large files. But if your use case is to back up TBs of data in a single transaction, it will only overheat you.