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The ASUS TUF Gaming A1 enclosure is another premium option for those looking for the toughest enclosure out there. The good thing about this enclosure is that it supports both M.2 SATA and M.2 NVMe drives. This one is the best M.2 SSD Enclosure for everybody who wants ASUS’s reliability but at a little higher price point. Another aluminum enclosure that is sleek and reliable in thermal performance. This enclosure is only available for M-Key M.2 SSDs i.e. M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs of up to 80mm in size. Most popular brands such as Samsung and Sabrent produce them. There’s also a small, built-in battery that provides 5-10 seconds (depending on which model you get) of service time in the event of a power failure. That brief window of time might be enough to allow the drive to finish writing some data and avoid corrupting your drive in the event of an ill-timed unplugging.
But first, the shape issue. Any M.2 drive you are looking at will be labeled with a four- or five-digit number as part of its specifications or model name. It's a measurement, in millimeters: The first two numbers define the drive's width, the second two the length. An RGB M.2 gaming enclosure that is compatible with many devices. This exceptional enclosure is compatible with most PCIe M.2 SSD SSDs up to 80mm in length. This enclosure is compatible with many gaming platforms, including PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. It also has a USB Type-C Gen 2 port that can be used at high speed. Know which bus you're on. In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in.
WD Blue SN570
A notable convenience is the inclusion of two cables: a USB Type-C cable and a USB Type-C to USB Type-A cable. Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. This is one of the most performant 10 Gbps enclosures and one of the most convenient, thanks to a tool-free design that allows you to slip the cover off by pressing a spring-loaded switch. It's a few dollars more than the Sabrent EC-SNVE at present and we prefer that enclosure's flip-up lid to the Plugble's slide-out one. One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's "Optane SSDs" were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.) Now, to reiterate an important point: A drive may come in the M.2 form factor, but that says nothing about the bus that it makes use of. Determining that is just as important as making sure it fits.
The market has settled on 22mm wide as the standard for desktop and laptop implementations; the aftermarket drives available and the accessible slots we've seen have all been that width. The most common lengths we've seen are 80mm ("Type-2280") and 60mm ("Type-2260"). The lengthier the drive, the more NAND chips you can tend to stuff on it (plus, M.2 drives can be single- or double-sided), though know that length isn't an absolute measure of capacity. 42mm, 60mm, and 80mm M.2 SSDs (Credit: Intel)The ultra-slim aluminum case paired with an ABS frame brings to the table not just style but remarkable durability. The supported SSD sizes are 2242, 2260, and 2280. The maximum speed you can get with this enclosure is 1000 MB/s. No additional drivers are required for installation because it is completely a Plug-and-play device.
The all-aluminum chassis has ridges to help with heat dissipation and it comes with both a thermal pad you can put on top of your SSD to keep it cool under prolonged loads. It’s a rather attractive silver enclosure that has a small cutout / handle area you can use for threading through a carabiner.
Apple cancelled this, now what?
When you install the kit 750-ADBF necessary to upgrade to the M.2 NVMe SSDs, you will wind up with two (2) front flex Bay positions that will support a M.2 module (Kit 575-BBSH). What I found was that you now have two (2) flex bay positions that will not recognize SATA or SAS Hard drives. (I had three SATA hard drives installed and one empty flex bay position). Now I can only use two of the flex bay positions for the SATA hard drives. If you install a SATA HDD module in one of these front flex bays configured for M.2 module, you get a flashing amber LED on the flex bay "door" and the SATA drive is not shown in Computer Management. That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might support only M.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed.
Dell Precision Workstation 5820 / 7820 / 7920 PCIe NVMe FlexBay Slots Will Not Detect SATA / SAS Drives The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For I don't have any of the benchmark screen shots, I'd have to grab a virgin drive and test to snag them.
Basic Compatibility, Card-Based M.2, and More
Yeah, thats pretty similar to the bench I did in the enclosure. Though for time I limited the run to 3 instead of 5. The key thing to remember about M.2 is that it is a form factor, a shape. The bus—the data pathway over which the data travels to and from an M.2 drive—is distinct from M.2 itself and can vary. And it can make all the difference. (Credit: Molly Flores) The PCIe NVMe SSD drive FlexBay has the physical data and power connector to allow a SATA or SAS drive to be physically installed. However, the FlexBay is only configured to communicate with PCIe NVMe SSDs. SATA or SAS drives installed in this FlexBay will not work due to an incompatibility with the drive controller.
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