Qwiizlab Fanless 40Gbps USB4 SSD Enclosure with Aluminum Chasiss, Compatible with Thunderbolt 5/4/3. Supports PCIe M.2 NVMe up to 8TB, Gray (SSD Not Included)

I got this to expand the storage on my M4 Mac Mini. Installed with a 2TB WD Black SN770 NVME SSD.I'd wanted to go with the OWC enclosure because of it has the ASM2464PD TB4 controller chip and rave reviews. As fate would have it, the OWC was on back order and the Qwiizlab enclosure (also has ASM2464PD) was in stock and had a coupon code making it much cheaper than the OWC.The enclosure is solid-- metal with passive cooling fins (like OWC) and installing the drive is very straightforward. There is a nice travel pouch in the box, but I have no intention of taking it anywhere.There are a handful of YT videos on how to properly move your Mac's home folder to external storage which I followed. This drive and enclosure work flawlessly. Read/Write speeds average over 3,000 MBs which I believe is on par with or faster than the internal storage of the Mac Mini (I got the 512GB model for only $50 more than the base).I haven't pushed the Mac Mini yet, so I can't speak to how warm the enclosure gets, but currently the Mac Mini is running around 89 degrees F and the enclosure which sits next to it is at 104.Frankly, I think you could go with a slightly slower drive (eg. WD Blue) and save a few bucks as the limitations of the enclosure and interface cap the speed-- which applies to all of these TB4 enclosures. Beyond that, I'm really impressed.

Update: Stays a little warm while the system is asleep, but doesn't stay hot like when it's in use. Also doesn't disconnect over long sleep periods like a lot of the other externals I have will, which makes macOS happier about not having a drive removed without ejecting.Original:Does certainly stay warm, regardless of if it's in use or not, but so does all my other NVMe fanless enclosures so that just seems to be the nature of the thing.I'll put a note here for other mac users, I decided to go with the WD_Black 850X to pair with this instead of something cheaper because of the fact it was the most battle tested drive in terms of reviews of happy people using them on macOS. I also have a day 1 850X in my windows system too so felt like it was worth the extra money to have something that has a proven track record rather than paring with a chepaer drive despite this enclusure not being able to harness it's full power.I do think the star screws are a little... pointlessly unstandard? I have a dozen of these types of cases and they all use standard phillips screws except this one, but I guess now I have a tiny star head screwdriver?

this thing can fry eggs it warms my coffee cup, but it works well. I don’t think it’ll last long. I think it’s probably gonna go up in flames one day.

TL;DR: You may need to flatten the thermal pad that you place between the board and the memory so that the memory card does not bend when you screw it down. This is not mentioned in the instructions. Also, Thunderbolt 3 compatibility with non-Macs is not assured (listing says it IS ThunderBolt 3 compatible). If you only plan to use this on a Mac, you probably will be fine, and perhaps OK with a Thunderbolt 4 PC (I cannot test this). This may be an issue with the controller chip (which many other enclosures use); if you must have Thunderbolt 3 speeds to get those transfer speeds on a non-Mac with only Thunderbolt 3, you may need to find a ThunderBolt 3 enclosure. It does work in such a machine, it just falls back to USB3 speeds. It is built well. Can't speak to longevity; check other reviews for that.-----This enclosure achieved Thunderbolt transfer rates on an M1 MacBook Pro where it was recognized as a Thunderbolt 4 device, and on an older x86 MacBook Pro, it was recognized as a Thunderbolt 3 device.But, I wanted to use this primarily on a Lenovo ThinkPad P53 laptop on Linux and Windows. This laptop successfully recognized an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock, a DisplayPort monitor attached to the dock, and an NVMe card on an NVMe to PCIe card adapter inserted in the dock, in both Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux 24.04 (Linux kernel 6.14). But it would not recognize this as a Thunderbolt device; instead it fell back to being a USB drive.Now, as a USB drive, it had respectable speeds, between 800-900 MB/sec, writing zeros to a large file in Linux (with no compression, as far as I was aware). But this was not the Thunderbolt speed that I bought the drive and the enclosure for on this machine and a fraction of what the drive could do on the M1 MacBook Pro.It may be a problem with the compatibility of the controller chip inside. If you search for this problem, you can see others report issues with this chip in various enclosures. Search "ASM2464 devices with older Intel Thunderbolt (3/4) hosts". So switching to another enclosure with the same controller may not help. (I will be looking into Thunderbolt 3 controllers that have USB fallback for non-TB hosts, or a TB4 enclosure with a known TB3-on-PC-compatible chipset.)I have reached out to the company and hope that either they have a firmware update for the enclosure which helps solve this problem or, if they can replicate this or have heard it from others, update the listing with this info.Also, this is not an enclosure you will want if you need to swap drives often. But at Thunderbolt speeds, quick swaps may not really be an option: the drives get hot, and the thermal pads need to be set up well to cool properly. So the extra cover screws are not that much more of a speed bump.Finally, the bottom thermal pad needs to be mashed down, because if you don't, it will be too think and the card will bend when you try to screw it down!!! This may stress memory chip solder joints.Photos show an error message in Linux dmesg when unplugging and replugging the cable as it fails to be recognized as Thunderbolt and successfully (and silently) falls back to USB. Also shown is the problem with the thick thermal pads that need to be smashed thinner.It is not as small as some USB non-TB adapters but the larger size helps dissipate heat for big transfers, which is why you are getting this!!!If you don't need the speed, a USB 3.1 alternative will be more economical.I spent most of a Sunday on this science project to learn why this would not run at TB3 speeds on the machine it was intended for, and wrote this to hopefully save someone else the trouble.

10/10 device. I didn't know thunderbolt devices got this warm/ hot. The heatsink design is a must. Similar to the OWC but cheaper. I do wish the thunderbolt cable was longer and labeled.. it's not an issue for me since I have a print labeler, but I'd be annoyed if I misplaced the cable or mixed it up with a regular USB cable. If you're using regular USB cables the drive won't get hot but you also won't get the fast speeds. Formatting the drive as Fat32 vs Apfs makes a difference but since I have to move files between windows and Mac it has to be Fat32... That being said, it's the fastest drive I currently own. Transferring 100s of files 50gb+ takes a few seconds. Even over USB 3.2 it'd take about a minute. I think an enclosure like this is wasted on 1tb drive or less. 2tb or more. Internal drive Samsung Evo 990 Plus, which is plenty fast.. considering that I was gonna use Fat32 file system this was good enough... Basically the same performance as the most expensive SSD they make. It's a 10/10 enclosure

A SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe with this enclosure helps to add more capacity for my iMac (M3, 8GB/256GB). It’s a fantastic deal considering this 1TB storage setup only costs $179 ($89 for SSD, $90 for enclosure) while you will be charged $400 to upgrade from 256GB to 1TB storage on Apple official website.I removed 4 Torx screws to open this chassis and then installed NVMe SSD drive. Another key point in my choice of this product was its fan-less design with aluminum build. I don't have to bear uncomfortable fan noise anymore while the temperatures of the drive and the case maintain at appropriate levels.I also conducted some speed tests on large file transfers and this case wielded excellent results without any issues. I achieved around 2900 MB/s on large seq. Read and Write on Disk Speed Test.

I got a Crucial P3 Plus 4TB (there are better SSDs, but i was optimizing for price/performance) i also replaced the cable of the case for a better one and the results are very nice.The value for money is pretty awesome, the disc came with extra thermal pads, its pretty easy to install and so far it has been great, it gets slightly warm, but it isnt uncomfortable to the touch and since its fanless it's noiseless. Recommended if you are limited to thunderbolt 4

UPDATE2: Drive keep dropping connection, wasn't sure why at first so I quit using it. Turns out, the unit needs a fan - gets too hot and drops connecction with my M4 mac mini. Found that out when I went to remove it right after it dropped connection and couldn't hold the case. It was idle at the time, in fact everytime it dropped, it was idle. That is my experience so beware. I don't have a way yet to try it with a fan blowing on it, but will eventually. But for now, I'll give it 1 star for that problem.

他社のファン冷却型エンクロージャを使っていたのですが、動画編集中に突然ファンが壊れ一気にSSDの温度が上昇して逝きかけたのがトラウマになり(笑、後継でファンレスのアルミシャーシ冷却型の本商品を購入。SSDとアルミシャーシの間にシリコンサーマルパッドを挟み、密着させて放熱させる仕組みで、ファンレスなので無音です。コントローラはASMedia ASM2464PD、実測でリード3,300MB/s、ライト3,000MB/s出ており、まあUSB4 40Gbpsとして妥当なところか。SSDの放熱もちゃんとされてるようで、うちの環境ではアイドル時40℃辺り、連続書き込み時も44℃辺りをキープ、部屋のエアコン切った状態でも1〜2℃上がる程度で安定動作しており、問題ないようです。

Excellent product!Quality product, easy setup, great speed (remember, speed is SSD dependent).Connects at USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 on Mac Mini M4.Excellent heat dissipation/management.Works on Mac Mini M4 with no Wi-Fi degradation.Would definitely buy again

Bsest enclosure

Dopo avere letto le recensioni degli utenti l'ho acquistato. Assemblato il disco nvme in pochi istanti seguendo le semplici istruzioni.E’ molto grande rispetto alle dimensioni del disco ma in commercio i case con queste velocità sono più o meno tutti identici. Questo però non ha ventola di raffreddamento, contando sulla scocca in alluminio per la dissipazione del calore. La parte superiore ha delle alette di raffreddamento che aumentano il potere dissipante. Scalda, è inutile nasconderlo ma è studiato appositamente. Premesso che non faccio un uso prolungato e intenso ma comunque la temperatura la raggiunge. Ora passiamo alla velocità: rispetto ai case da 10gbps è un’altra cosa. Ed è il motivo per cui l’ho acquistato. E poi ne ho acquistato un secondo. Li uso con un mac mini m1 che ha porte thunderbolt 3 ed è una scheggia. Quando avrò un TB4 ci sarà il vero salto, per ora sono super soddisfatto.

This is FAST!Inside it a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB, connected to a Macbook Pro 16-inch M1 Max 2021 with 32 GB of ram.Just transferred 450 GB and the enclosure did get quite hot, but the nvme was still performing really good.Build quality is top-notch, cable is too short for me but I have other TB4 cables.Compared to another nvme thunderbolt 3 enclosure that I use, this is more than twice faster.You might not need this speed, but for example if you open many big phpstorm projects, this it worth it big time.