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Review on πŸ’» High-Speed USB 3.0 Aluminum Enclosure for M.2 NGFF SSDs with UASP Support by Paul Koehler

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Good housing for homeless M.2 drives

This small drive has a lot to offer. It's easy to set up and use, works with a variety of drives, is relatively fast, and gives my homeless M.2 drive a place to live. To install, all you have to do is remove the cover, insert the disc and snap it into place. under the plastic clip, slide the cover back and forth. After that, it behaves like a normal HDD/M.2/ssd. So the drive needs to be formatted when it's new, otherwise Windows won't see anything in File Explorer. But there are a few downsides that hold it back. A small problem is that the external light shows no activity. There is obviously an LED inside, but to see it you have to look into the slots. It's one of those little touches that gives feedback that it's plugged in, getting power and whatnot. As others have reported it tends to get hot but that is a matter of convenience, don't buy it for a new M.2 6x hot rod, my old M.2 got hot but not hot enough for me disturb. There are no heatsinks in the drive, and cramming them into this tiny enclosure is impractical. The biggest problem is that it draws a lot of power from the USB bus. So if you have a few power-hungry devices hooked up to your bus, that device can draw enough to cause a power surge and crash it. This happened to me several times before I realized what was happening. I had two power hungry devices plugged into the same USB bus and my system crashed. After unplugging another device it worked fine, plug in a power hungry device and it crashes as soon as I start transferring a large file. I was able to replicate this on two systems with different devices that otherwise worked fine. There may be a different issue here, but my system is reporting bus performance and total usage, and this little pooch was using the most energy copying a large file. Problem as the M.2 card you are using is making the problem worse. It's perfect for old stray M.2 drives and makes for a nice fast external portable. So IMHO 4 stars.

Pros
  • So far satisfied
Cons
  • Write later