MOKiN M.2 NVMe SATA SSD Enclosure Reader Tool-Free, NVMe PCIe SSD to USB C Adapter Reader Case

I previously purchased a Sabrent USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure from Amazon for use as a high performance file transfer system using a 1TB M.3 NMVe RAM stick. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the rubber card clip to attach to both the RAM stick and the enclosure at the same time. After a period of frustration, I finally kludged the thing together (not the way it was supposed to go, but sufficient for it to work). The Sabrent enclosure worked fine, and continues to do so. I decided I needed another similar device, and knowing that I wouldn't be satisfied with the Sabrent, I took the chance on this Mokin enclosure, even though it had a rubber card mounting clip. When I opened the Mokin enclosure I was delighted to find that it didn't employ the slot-key fit process that Sabrent uses, but has a rubber clip that slides on the the RAM card and aligns with a hole on the enclosure so all you have to do is to press the rubber clip's tip into the hole and it is secured. I was amazed by its simplicity and that it worked first time I tried. While I still would prefer using a real screw to secure the card, I was very impressed by this rubber clip system. Of course, the unit functions the way it should, and when plugged into a USB C 10Gbps jack it performs as it should. Like the Sabrent enclosure, this one also will take either a SATA or NMVe card. While I haven't tried the SATA capability, I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't function just as reliably as does the NMVe. If I ever need to do this again, or maybe if I need to purchase an enclosure to house a larger NMVe drive for cloning, the Mokin will definitely be my first choice.Update: I just purchased my 5th one of these enclosures from Amazon (18 Aug 2021). Obviously, if they didn't work I wouldn't continue to buy them. Now that you can purchase 250GB NVMe drives for about $30 and 500GB NVMe drives for about $65, it just doesn't make sense to purchase high-end USB flash drives that deliver less than 1/8th the performance for the same or more cost. That's why I have been purchasing so many. Using the USB-C (10gb/s) option, I am routinely seeing serial transfer speeds close to what the advertised specs are for the M.2 NVMe drives I put in them. You will never get that kind of performance from a flash drive. Also, in comparison to other enclosures I've tried, these Mokin enclosures have been giving me the longest bursts of maximum performance (as many as 90GB data transfer before any slowdown, and the ability to transfer more than 590GB in length without terminally failing (the largest transfer I made was in backing up an internal 1TB SSD and it had a little over 585GB of data on it and contained an enormous number of short files that were music samples, as it was a disk containing Kontakt sample libraries). Both functionally and ergonomically, I can't recommend these enclosures strongly enough!Update 10/9/21 I hadn't used the Mokin enclosure to make a clone SSD before, but I just completed cloning my HP Elitebook NVMe 512GB Samsung SSD to a 1TB HP Black NVMe SSD using Macrium Reflect 7 Free Home Version. The cloning went smoothly and completed in just a little over 9 min. The clone that was produced was accurate. So, I can now recommend the Mokin enclosure for the purpose of cloning Windows 10 system SSDs.Update 04/10/2022 I'm up to nine of these in use now. Recently, I purchased a Mac Mini M1 that had only a 523GB internal drive. I purchased a Samsung EVO+ NVMe 2TB drive and, of course, one of these to connect it to one of the Thunderbolt ports on the Mac. Incredible performance. Routinely getting between 3.5-4.2 MB/S transfers to and from the drive. I have never seen anything so fast through a USB 3.2 port on a PC. Maybe I don't dislike Macs as much as I thought I did :)

Outstanding product! I had an old NVMe drive with BitLocker enabled, which I use for work and has a lot of applications and configurations I’d rather not reinstall. As a software engineer with a complex dual-boot setup (Linux and Windows), and multiple WSL instances, this drive was crucial. However, it was down to 60% health with 950GB used out of 1TB.I recently purchased a brand-new 4TB Acer Predator NVMe drive. I set up the old drive as the source and the new drive as the target, initiated the cloning process (press and hold for 3 seconds, then double-tap), went for a walk, and returned to a perfectly cloned setup. After swapping in the new drive, my system booted as if I’d never changed a thing!If you want hassle-free cloning and an easy upgrade experience, you need this in your life.Sure there is free software that does this *( you can do it in linux by writing a copy command) i'm pretty sure that's what this is doing, but it's still woth it IMO. I end up having to do this from time to time, and it's an incredible way to do a backup . I think you could pretty much buy some really cheap nvme drives and also use this as a simple backup.

Overall rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up due to unique form factor (would be an average 3 if not for the, IMO, better size) and overall good design and performanceTL;DR: Good design with a couple minor flaws; nice, unique footprint; may or may not need to add a thermal pad, but probably a good idea; great chipset, but performance not up to spec (caveat: only tested on one computer), though plenty good enough.I got this after trying a couple other enclosures (ASINs B08DNR22Q7 & B08RVC6F9Y, by UGREEN and Sabrent, respectively), and overall it works fairly well and has a pretty good design, though there are some minor issues. I tried so many different enclosures because none of them, including this one, worked with the drive that came with my laptop for no apparent reason. It's a standard (aside from being a cheap Chinese generic) M-key NVMe drive, so there's no reason it shouldn't have worked, which leads me to the conclusion that there's something going on with standards and compatibility. When I contacted Sabrent tech support about it, they simply said the drive isn't compatible, without giving any explanation beyond that, even though their enclosure, like all of them, is compatible with M-key NVMe drives. Anyways, it gave me an opportunity to compare the different aspects of each enclosure, and here's my findings:Design: I wasn't sure about the form factor, since the pictures made it look much wider but only slightly shorter than typical enclosures. However, it's quite a bit shorter, and I definitely prefer the shorter, wider form factor, as it's far more compact (93x40x10mm). I do prefer the how the others I tried opened and closed versus this one. The UGREEN slides open like this one, but it's held closed by tension, whereas this one uses an end piece that slides off, meaning another loose piece to keep track of and not lose, and the Sabrent opens like a clamshell, which is the best design IMO. But the Sabrent had the worst design for the plug inside that holds the drive in place, which is a rubber piece that takes a good bit of struggling with to get the drive in and out, and risks breaking the rubber plug, which people have done. This one is better, since the piece is plastic, and it's much easier to insert and remove, though to remove it you have to pull up on teh drive itself, which feels like you might break it, so it loses a little points there. The UGREEN has by far the best design here, with a rotating plastic piece.Chipset: There are three USB chipset makers, which are Realtek (the best, and the one one here and in a few other enclosures), ASMedia (a not too distant second best, and much more common), and JMicron (far inferior, by far the most common due to being cheaper, and an option here, but generally not worth it to save a few bucks). Another point regarding the design applies here, in that the wider form factor allows the chipset to be beside, rather than under, the SSD, which almost certainly helps with heat.Heat: It gets hot. That shouldn't come as a surprise, since SSDs, and especially NVMe drives, get hot. But it's never become uncomfortably hot. I've used it with two SK hynix P31 Gold SSDs, a 1TB and 2TB. These drives are more power efficient, and therefore cooler, than any other drive, so they're not going to get as hot as an Evo, SN850, etc, so heat may be more of an issue with those drives, but for me, it wasn't. That said, I put a GELID GP-Ultimate 1.0mm thermal pad on it to see what difference it made, and it definitely seems to have helped. I'm not a thermodynamics expert, so I'm not sure why exactly, since the case being hot without it seems to me to indicate that the heat is moving from the drive to the case, which then acts as a heatsink, just fine, but after applying it, while still warm, it's more of a lukewarm vs hot, definitely cooler than without, and it also seems to cool off quicker once idle. I guess without it the heat builds up for several seconds until heating the air inside enough to start transferring to the case, by which point it's much hotter, whereas with it the heat reaches the case sooner and therefore never builds up as much. The bottom line is, you might be fine without, especially if just doing a few minutes here and there of reading/writing, but it's probably best to just spend the extra few bucks and get some good thermal pad material and use it, especially since some people have stated the heat from this enclosure fried their drives (that seems a bit suspect, since drives throttle to prevent overheating, but whatever). The use of a pad, however, is the main reason why this case loses points on design (aside from not including one, as some cases do), because you want the pad to be thick enough to make contact with the case, and they're slightly sticky, and those two factors don't pair well with each other when you're dealing with a case that slides open and closed. Had they made this a clamshell with a built-in thermal pad designed at just the right thickness for the case, it would have been a far superior design.Performance: This is rated at 10 Gbps, or 1,250 MB/s. I tested using the above-mentioned drives, which are rated at 3,500 MB/s read and 3,200 write. This means these drives are more than capable of saturating this enclosure's, and USB 3.2's, throughput, a few times over. Granted, USB has some overhead, so you're not actually going to hit 1,250, but I would expect to at least get close. Unfortunately, I'm not. Doing a transfer with FastCopy (significantly faster than Windows, though I did also test with Windows which, unsurprisingly, fared much worse) from the internal to the external drive and vice-versa, the fastest speed I achieved was ~665 MB/s, or slightly more than half the expected speed. It was better with With CDM, reaching 956 MB/s, but I feel that's not as realistic a test and it's probably more a test of the drive, limited by the interface, than the interface/enclosure itself. And even so, it's still only 76% of what it should be. Meanwhile, the internal drive hit 3,474 MB/s, just shy of its rated speed, despite being in active use. So while several hundred MB/s is impressive, and more than most people will probably achieve a lot of the time due to other limitations (e.g. transferring from/to a HDD), it's a far cry from the rated speed. The caveat here is that these are limited tests, especially due to only performing in on one computer, and it wouldn't surprise me with the various driver and firmware issues it has if the USB port itself is the problem. Still, just based on my limited experience with it, it loses some points here. Also, the fastest I've seen in reviews is 1,042 from two separate people, which is still only 83% of the rated speed. More below.Accessories: One nice touch is that it comes with a USB-C to C as well as a C to A cable. Most only come with one or the other. I haven't tried swapping out the cable to see if a different one helps with the performance, because even if it did, that wouldn't really matter. A product should be judged based on how it performs out of the box, not with modifications. I did, after writing this, decide to try the USB A cable, and in both ports, one 3.2 Gen 2 and one 3.2 Gen 1, the speed was almost exactly half that with the USB-C cable. This made me wonder if it was due to running at half-duplex, so I flipped the C connector but didn't get any change in speed. So perhaps the cables are just cheap and that's the reason for the reduced performance after all. I would try with a better cable, but the only other one I have on hand is the one that came with my crappy Samsung phone, and the cable is apparently of similar quality, only reaching a pathetic ~39 MB/s.