Satechi M.2 Enclosure – USB4 NVMe SSD Pro Enclosure, 40Gbps, up to 16TB, Aluminum Enclosure with Silicone Pin, Polycarbonate Casing, USAP SSD Trim for Sizes 2280/2260/2242/2230mm (SSD Not Included)

Supper fast and great temperature control. Perfect for my Mac mini. Works well with my editing software. Make sure to buy a fast card.

I've had this a bit over a week (maybe longer) and so far it's been good if running a little toasty (to the touch), maybe this just means the heat is dissipating efficiently? Following the instructions, I reluctantly placed the thermal pad directly on the SSD, though there's a product pic here and YouTube videos that show the pad placed on the enclosure top. I decided the dissipation was probably best with the pad on the chip (and decided to follow the printed instructions) - but who knows? I decided to boot my new Mac Mini M4 base model (256GB internal SSD) from this Satechi and a Samsung 990 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD. It beats the internal SSD for speed by a bit (getting ~3k write/read via this enclosure + short cable). Initially I was just going to have my home directory and any application I could install or move to it, but this became annoying since many applications don't give an option to install externally, and some others do not want to be moved from the internal SSD to anywhere else. And the internal 256GB SSD could fill up quickly. So, I am booting OS X 15.1.1 directly off the Satechi and it is working nicely. I tried a longer cable and I believe it worked just as well as with the included short cable. The trick is to make sure any cable is TB4/USB4 (40Gbps) and high quality. The alternate cable I used was a 3.3 FT Anker USB C / USB 4 40gbps - but I went back to the included short cable because it worked better on my desktop. I guess some downsides might be: the heat (using brew install smartmontools to monitor and so far it seems ok at ~54c - the internal SSD runs cooler at ~31c); and if the cable gets knocked out there could be a problem booting. I plan to buy an additional enclosure and SSD to back this one up with Time Machine! But might check out the OWC 1M2 enclosure next.

For an external device this thing is darn quick. I've got a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro that I pulled from my windows tower PC because I had a huge project with a bunch of 4K video files I needed to work on with my Macbook - with the stock heatsink on the SSD, I am unable to close the Satechi enclosure, but I've been using it topless for a couple of days now without any issues. It kinda looks cool this way too. Not sure what the plastic shell is for, as it's not mentioned at all in the instructions- seems like it would just make the aluminum body retain more heat, so I'm not using it.

I bought this external enclosure to use with a 8TB WD SN850X internal NVMe SSD on a M3 Max MacBook Pro. This gives me read and write speeds of >3,000 MB/s, which is many times faster than the ready made 8TB External drives on the market, for not a lot more cost wise.Sadly, this enclosure is not Thunderbolt 5 capable, but then nor is my M3 Max MacBook Pro. There are better options available if you plan on using this enclosure with the very latest computers.That aside, installation is easy and tool free. It looks great, feels good in-hand, is reasonably compact and is blazingly fast!One minor quibble is that there is a little rubber bung like thing which secures your drive in place, inside the enclosure. A screw would have been better, even if it meant you lost the tool free convenience. The enclosure also gets hot to the touch with the SN850X inside and running, but this is to be expected without active cooling.Overall, I’m happy with it. Would recommend!

I received a used product and returned it for this reason. While I had it in my possession I did get to checkout the build quality, which seemed overall good, but the design seemed a bit flawed because to dissipate heat I've never heard anyone using a polycarbonate shell, if anything that traps heat in that the to small of aluminum finis are disipating. I liked that it said it supported 40Gbps, TRIM, USAP, and 16TB of data storage. There are only a couple or few options that do those right now.

Great build quality. Blazing speeds with my SN850X. Highly recommend.

Hardware involved:SATECHI SSD EnclosureWD_BLACK SN850X SSD (WD_BLACK)Macbook Pro M2 (Mac)Dell Precision 7770 (Dell)Both laptops have Thunderbolt 4 ports capable of 40 Gbps (Gigabit not Byte)1. Mac - WD_BLACK - APFS Formatted: Over 3000 MBps read/write (MegaBYTE not bit). The best speeds I have seen. This is almost as fast write, but faster read than my Macintosh HD.2. Dell - WD_BLACK - NTFS Formatted: ~2200 MBps write and ~2600MBps read. The slowest out of all pictures but still quick. Not as fast as the Mac. Unfortunately is a little slower compared to the Dell's built in SSD (WD Green SN350).Additionally I decided to compare the exFAT formatted WD_BLACK between the Mac and Dell:3. Mac - WD_BLACK - exFAT formatted: ~2700 MBps write and ~3000 MBps read. Slightly slower write speed than the APFS Formatted version.4. Dell - WD_BLACK - exFAT formatted: ~2400 MBps write and ~2600 MBps read. Faster than its NTFS Formatted version, but still slightly slower to the Dell's built in SSD.Transferred over 600 GB of .iso files from my Dell to this Enclosure with the WD_BLACK and got an average of 1.3 GB per second. Copied everything over in under 8 minutes.Overall this enclosure proved that it works well with professional-grade machines like the Macbook Pro and Dell Precision series, with a preference over Mac, but still does well with a Windows machine (as long as it has Thunderbolt 4). Highly recommend using this enclosure to build a portable SSD over ANY portable SSD you may find at best buy. It might be more expensive but the $$$ is worth it!Also this thing looks like it came out of a James Bond movie! Super cool! Q would be blown away at this!