Satechi has revealed a new USB4 SSD enclosure, turning any NVMe drive into a sleek external drive. It’s designed with the M4 Mac Mini in mind, but also works with other USB and Thunderbolt devices at the fastest-available speeds.
The newUSB4 NVMe Enclosurecan support solid state drives (SSDs) in the standard 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 sizes, with capacities up to 8TB, and turns them into high-speed external storage. Satechi is promising speeds of up to 40Gbps, which is more than enough for most M.2 and NVMe drives. However, it would be a bottleneck for PCIe 5 drives like theWD Black SN8100, so you should consider Thunderbolt 5 enclosures if you need full performance with the highest-end SSDs.
Satechi said in its announcement, “Harnessing the power of USB4 technology, the USB4 Slim NVMe SSD Enclosure is engineered for speed, delivering transfer rates of up to 40 Gbps— eight times faster than standard USB 3.0 technology. Move up to ten 4K movies (63.21 GB) in under 40 seconds or transfer more than 4,000 high-res images (20GB) in just half a minute.”
This is clearly designed to be an M4 Mac Mini accessory first and foremost, much like the company’sM4 Mini Stand & Hub dock. The aluminum shell exterior and dimensions perfectly match Apple’s compact desktop Mac. It will work with any other USB4 computers and tablets, though, including Thunderbolt 5 computers and tablets—Thunderbolt 5 is backwards-compatible with USB4. Satechi says it’s also “backward-compatible with USB-C devices,” so you should still be able to use it with older devices at reduced speeds.
Importantly, there’s no included drive with the enclosure. If you don’t have a suitable drive already, any of thebest internal SSDsshould work with this enclosure, as long as they’re NVMe and not the older 2.5-inch design. You can also save some money by not picking the fastest possible SSDs, since the USB4 interface will be a bottleneck for those drives. For example, the2TB WD Black SN7100is only $140 as of the time of writing, and it would fully saturate the 40Gbps USB4 connection.
These NVMe enclosures are agreat way to add more high-speed storageto a computer or tablet, especially with devices that don’t have easily-upgradable internal drives. You get the portability benefits of a flash drive with performance closer to internal NVMe drives. I have a similar USB 3.2 enclosure with a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD, and it mostly stays connected to my M1 Mac Mini for Final Cut Pro libraries. The drive is great for moving big files, though, since the capacity and speeds are much higher than any flash drive I own.
You canbuy the Satechi USB4 NVMe Enclosurefor $120, and the codeLIMITED20at checkout will take $20 off the price until June 16. That’s more expensive than competing USB4 enclosures fromUGREENorACASIS, but this enclosure is a lot more sleek. Again, there’s no SSD included.
