NVMe M.2 Duplicator Dual-Bay Offline Clone Tool-Free, 10Gbps

I use these for both data recovery and drive cloning. Easy to use, and nice & compact. I like the system recognized the brand of the actual drive and not just the generic USB adapter.

I purchased this USB to SSD adapter following the crash of my old laptop. The adapter was easy to use and allowed me to recover many files off the laptop’s old SSD. This adapter is USB 3.1 compatible so the transfer rate was relatively high. I am happy with my purchase.

Worked great for cloning a bigger m.2 drive. The old drive is now in this case as a usb stick which transfers at 300Mb/s. Tv like the faster drive speed also for playing mp4’s

It was easy to install. Came with two cables to handle both regular or C USB connections. Worked immediately on Windows 10 without any drivers. I bought before a more expensive device and had to return it because the computers did not recognize the M.2 drive.

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 performance
TL;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.