[Upgraded Version Support UASP] Ultra Slim USB 3.0 to 2.5-Inch SATA External Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure [Black] (EC-UK30)

This Thunderbolt 3 NVME M.2 SSD drive enclosure has been a solid, passively cooled, reliable workhorse for many years now, I have taken it on planes, trains, and to many different states in many different conditions. THIS IS NOT WATERPROOF, however it is very durable, and has not overheated on me. I keep PC Games and photos and videos on mine and it's quite fast. The enclosure features a completely tooless design, which has aided in drive formatting and setting up new windows images or cloning drives from my laptop. Seriously this was a great buy and I should have reviewed it sooner, worth every penny.

Ok, for the price, it's a really good case. First of all it's like a black anodized aluminum case, just big enough to fit the 2.5" drive. There is like a small rubber pad on the inside that seems to isolate it and hold it in place, nothing else holds it in place on the inside. The electronics plugs right into the sata interface on the drive, and is the other end of the case cover as well. It ships with 2 small screws and a small phillips driver which didn't work well, i used a slightly larger one i had at home and was able to screw it in tighter. Comes with a short usb 3.0 cable, the standard size on both size (rectanguler), plugged it into my laptop and at first nothing. But i forgot, it was from a ps4 so i had to go into the computer management and repartition the drive, and format it, then it worked fine as an external. It comes with with a vinyl like case to carry the drive around. So overall, it's sort of made cheap, but for the price, it's a great little case in my opinion. I noticed the the usb port was a little wonky as i almost plugged it in backwards (thought i broke the connector) but it's still working (tiny blue led shows disk access). Going to buy a few more of these for my extra drives i have sitting around, and the drive is powered by the usb cable as well, so couldn't be easier then that to add some storage to stuff like your tv, blu ray player, to store all the smart tv apps and things, or to your network router as a network drive. So far working well, and formatted as my F: drive. Update: Ok, assembled 4 of these so far. I did read that one person had problems with the circuit board touching the aluminum case. When you attach the drive, and insert it into the case, try both ways, flip it around, i always found that it fit better one way rather then other for whatever reason, but they all assembled fine. None of mine touched the case, BUT, if the 2 screws get loose, i can see the small soldered ends possibly can touch. So what i did, was the cases come packed with like this black foam, i cut just a super thin layer of it, to cover the ends and just shoved it on top, i'll see if i can take a pic and post it, but it's just the foam, i just pushed it on there, super thin layer lol. So far though, i have one on my ps4 pro, i have one on my network router, i'm using one as a small backup for my laptop, these are great so far. using 3 2.5" drives, 2 standard, 1 ssd, 1 hybrid, they all work fine.

I was tasked with editing a 4K/24fps interview for a local client and needed a separate drive to hold the data on from the internal on my M1 MacBook Pro. I had an old 240GB MyDigitalSSD BPX (2280) M.2 NVMe SSD lying around, so I thought it would make the perfect video editing drive, but I needed an enclosure that could fully use the NVMe speed--something Thunderbolt 3. I still use a Sabrent-brand NVMe drive in another computer that has performed perfectly since I bought it, so thought highly of the manufacturer. This was no disappointment. The box feels solid and hard, so tough I have no problem just throwing this drive into my bag along with my other components. The assembly is almost insultingly easy, no tools needed to insert the drive and close it up, not even a screw to hold down the M.2 drive. The only confusing part of installation was the lack of any information on what the cooling pads were for--I had to look up on YouTube to realize the colorful blue stickers were to act as cooling pads for the drive, and the reason it came with two of them was because they were different thicknesses. I ended up using the thinner of the two since the thicker one didn't quite fit. Since then, it's been perfect. I was able to edit my 4K/24 interview in Premiere Pro on my M1 MacBook Pro without any drive-related performance issues. Any slowdowns that happened were due to CPU processing and not the drive's delivery of data. The box does get warm, but not too warm. It never gets too hot to touch, and it never fails even after hours of use. I've worked with the drive both plugged in direct and through my CalDigit TS3 Plus, and in both arrangements performance is identical. My only issue was that the price IS higher than other enclosures, but I guess you just have to pay more for the faster interface--unquestionably, it's worth it.

This device will not work using Apple's bi-direction Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter connected directly to the Thunderbolt 2 equipped MacBook Pro I am using. However if you use the adapter to connect a Thunderbolt 3 dock to the MacBook Pro the device works just fine using the Dock's second Thunderbolt 3 port. I know that Thunderbolt 2 has half the speed of Thunderbolt 3 so I knew it would run slower. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test showed about 1.3GBps Read and about 600MBps Write. Slower than PCI-e 2.0 x4 but much better than HDD and SATA SSDs. The NVMe was a Samsung 960 Pro 1024GB. The Mac's Disk Utility saw the NVMe as a Solid State device which is good as some USB enclosures mark the SSD as Not Solid State which is bad as the OS may try to run defrag unless the SSD is formatted as APFS (Apple File System) as that cannot be defragged by any 3rd party Defrag app. Best feature is that the NVMe can be installed and removed without the need for any tools. However it's only compatible with 80mm long NVMe SSDs as there are no mounting points for smaller SSDs. Since 80mm is industry standard it shouldn't pose a big problem. Overall good performance despite using Thunderbolt 2 although a bit disappointed at the write speed. Theoretically Thunderbolt 2 should get up to 2.5GBps but I have to run some additional tests. Got it from Sabrent's Amazon outlet store so it was $20 cheaper as it doesn't come in a factory sealed box and is completely loose in the envelope it came in.

I bought this for a new Mac Mini M2 Pro I bought so it could have a huge, fast external drive for various projects. Use was as dead simple as it can be. You turn a very easy to use semi-circular handle that flips up, remove the metal panel, snap in your NVMe card, replace the panel and turn the handle back to its original position, plug it into a Thunderbolt/USB C port, and you are done. It takes less time to install a drive in it and get it hooked up than it took me time to write this. Fast transfer speeds that take advantage of Thunderbolt 3/4. Heat is not a problem even with intense use, and its so rugged I bet I could throw it up against a brick wall and it would hurt the wall before harming itself. The design seems, well, Apple-like in its ease of use and functionality. (Remember the easy-to-remove side doors of PowerMac G5’s and MacPros? It’s that well made.) Can’t think of how I would improve on it. Well worth the money.

This thing is a snap to put together. I had it assembled in, I kid you not, under a minute. It took me longer to get out of the package and to unbox the SSD itself. Putting the disk into the enclosure takes seconds, and locking it in place with the super clever twist lock takes less than that. I wish motherboard manufacturers would use that little twist lock for SSDs! The outer door of the enclosure, where you see the thumb ring thing, snaps right into place and locks easily. The hardest part of that? If you're not paying attention, you can easily put it on upside down. If you do that—like I did—it will have a propensity to fall off. This is *not* their fault. They clearly mark with little triangle arrows, right there on the door and the case, how not to do this. I was just being a dope. It's ROCK solid. You could probably throw it like an MLB pitcher and knock a seagull out of the sky, and it'd be completely unharmed when it hit the ground. The whole thing is a nice, substantial aluminum that feels meaty and protective without being overly heavy. From a technical standpoint, yes, it is Thunderbolt 3! This is distinct from USB 3. This is distinct from USB-C. Let me explain: If you have a port on your computer that looks like "USB-C" and you know it's Thunderbolt 3: it will work at ridiculous full speed, way faster than a "USB SSD." You're getting an NVMe device directly on your bus. If that same port is TB4: It'll work just fine but you won't get the extra speed of TB4. It'll just be the same as above. Honestly, there aren't that many TB4 compliant devices out there yet, and definitely not at this price point. If you have a port that looks like "USB-C" but it's some vague, unspecified "USB 3", or if you have a port that looks like "regular USB," but probably has like a blue part inside the socket and then you use an adapter cable: You'll get... okay speed. I can't write a massive treatise for you on the complete mess that all the different things "USB 3" could mean (and it's a MESS because of dumb marketing reasons), but the possibilities here range from being acceptable performance to "hm, not bad!" This thing's got one major weak point: they give you a *ridiculously* short little cable with it. Like, absurdly short. It's an okay quality cable, vinyl rather than braided unfortunately but still okay, it's just that it's stupid short. Anyway, if you're looking for a Thunderbolt 3 SSD enclosure, and you're poking through all the different no-name brands and thinking you might just go with one of the major brands like this one (btw, Sabrent is a major brand) the answer is: YES. THIS ONE. But when you put it in your cart? Add a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable.

Tested with a 2017 vintage HGST 500 GB drive. Works great, no issues, transfer speed within expectations, limited by the vintage drive electronics more than the Sabrent USB controller. USB port is backwards compatible to at least USB 2. This external enclosure is a fine and dandy way repurposing old SATA laptop drives, turning them into MP3 libraries for those of us who prefer our own music instead of vehicular streaming, as one example.

There is nothing special here. This is just a cheap bare bones USB 3.0 drive enclosure with adequate read and write speeds. The quality of the case itself is what I would consider "decent". It does provide some protection for the drive but the top will not close all the way and my 2.5" drive slaps around the inside. As far as aesthetics go the enclosure has a modern, sleek look to it, I find it pretty attractive. Installing a 2.5" drive into the bay was pretty straight forward. The top comes already removed, all you have to do is align the SATA connectors on the face-plate with the connectors on the drive, push them together, slide the drive into the case, and then secure the face-plate with screws (this simplicity actually causes a few problems which will be noted later on).. I tested the drive using two identical drives, one was utilizing a SATA III interface and the other was in this drive enclosure hooked up to a USB 3.0 port. The drive when connected to SATA had average read and write speeds of 77 and 61 MB /s respectively. When bench-marked through the drive enclosure the speeds were nearly slashed in half. Through the enclosure I was getting read and write speeds around 32 and 27 MB /s. This speed reduction was not too big of a deal for me, the read and write rates were completely adequate for what I needed the drive for (storing movies, pictures, documents, ect...), but I thought it would still be appropriate to note this. Okay, so at this point I would have happily given the enclosure 4 stars but I ran into a pretty big issue. After moving the dive around the house for a couple of days the hard drive disconnected from the contacts inside the case. I opened the drive up and reseated the connection but a few days later this happened again. The internal HD is pushed into the drives contacts via a small foam pad all the way in the back, this is the only way it is held in place. As I said earlier my HD flopped around the inside of the case so obviously it was not doing its job and thus the connection was also coming lose. As a sort of "ghetto fix" I put a couple layers of electrical tape on the back of my drive and this slight increase in thickness solved the problem. For the price this is a decent drive enclose with a few drawbacks. If you just need something cheap which will get the job done and you don't mind having to make a few tweaks to it then this will probably be fine for you. FOR MORE INFO CHECK OUT THIS VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkraRyEwg1U Pros: Cheap gets the job done easy to assemble looks nice Quality of the included USB cable is good Cons: carrying case smells funny Drive speeds reduced Drive initially not secured in the enclosure properly Face-plate will not close all the way