- 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)

UPDATE: As hoped, the thermal pads, with time and perhaps heat cycles, have conformed quite well. After removing the cover (have had the unit for a week or so) the pads have conformed and are no longer causing excessive pressure on the components, and lid - which now closes quite nicely. Increasing rating to 5 stars. Works as expected and adds the necessary extra storage for my M4 Mac Mini base model. As mentioned though, the thermal pads that came with the enclosure just not the right thickness. I put one pad on for starters and it didn't contact the enclosure cover, and neither did the one on the control chip, so I attached the additional pads included for both the memory card and the control chip and with both installed, they were really too thick causing the cover to be difficult to push into position to put the screws in. Over time I suspect the pads will form up well enough and since the case does get warm, I'm thinking there is at least some thermal relief is being provided to the hot parts. I think they should have done the work to figure out the appropriate pad thickness or included additional pads of different thicknesses to correct for any variabillity.

It was a breeze to install my Samsung 990Pro 2Tb NVME M.2 SSD inside this enclosure. I needed it to expand the memory of my 2025 Mac Studio. They include small screwdrivers needed to open the enclosure (look inside the box, it might be easy to miss the small plastic containing them). For easier installation including how to properly stick the silicone heat absorbing pads on your SSD, I recommend you follow the YouTube video that Qwiizlab posted on their YouTube page. This was my first time setting up my own external SSD and it was a breeze! I’ve attached photos of the speedtest I did using this external SSD enclosure with my CableMatters thunderbolt 5 cable. By the way, it gets hot during use and even when on standby (which is expected with external SSDs) but never too hot to burn or cause blistering when touched.

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.

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.

Extremely fast! I am using this with my WD SN850x and it's incredibly fast. The only downside is that my SSD came with its own heatsink so with something like that I have to take apart my SSD and remove the heatsink in order to get this to fit in the case. What would take an hour to transfer with my Samsung T9 SSD takes literally 10 seconds with this setup. I love it!

Running 4TB Crucial chip in it. Had purchased 2 of these end of October, set both aside until I just had the cash to buy 2 4TB Crucials. Just received the sticks BUT now I find these enclosures with the stick in then burn so hot that you can NOT hold you hand on top of it. Useless - chip gets too hot and SSD drive drops connection when copying to it!! I have the same model of SSD chips in another brand that only does TB3 max, and works perfectly! Never drops a file set in copy over to it but this Qwlizlab drops out in just a few seconds.

Host system: 2020 M1 Mac Mini, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, macOS 15.6.1 Drive installed in this Qwiizlab enclosure: Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD 2TB, formatted APFS Blackmagic Disk Speed Test of internal Apple Fabric connected drive: 2942.7 write, 2985.4 read Blackmagic Disk Speed Test of external USB4 Qwiizlab/Samsung drive: 3008.2 write, 3033.4 read This enclosure has wildly surpassed my expectations. This is my first time using a "modern" external drive; all of my others are old type spinning-disk HDD's. Benchmarks above show it is even faster than my internal drive, which is kind of hard to wrap my head around. I re-ran the benchmarks over and over, and while they do have a certain amount of variance, the Qwiizlab/Samsung combo is consistently faster. Other reviewers have commented about heat from this device. Mine is currently 96.6F/35.9C while running two virtual machines in Fusion. While it is somewhat warm, it is certainly not hot. I did have problems during first setup - the drive would disconnect frequently and it would not format or initialize properly. This was resolved by plugging directly into my Mac with the provided USB4 cable, bypassing the USB-C extension I tried to use. Once plugging in directly, it has been completely stable and fast.

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.

読み書き共に3000MB/s台。最初は900MB/s しか出なかったが、ケーブルを一旦取り外して差し直したら期待通りの速度が出ました。結構暖かくなる場合がありますが許容範囲内だと思います。ヒートシンクが機能している証拠です。上面と底面がなるべき空気に触れるようするために、縦にするかもしくは側面に寝かした方が良いと思います。 色はシルバー系かなと思っていましたが、実物はダークグレイでした。特に気にならないです。また、チップ上に乗せるサーマルパッドが既に貼り付けられていのであれ？と思いました。予備のサーマルパッドとネジ類が付属していて嬉しかったです。

Desde el primer momento me pareció que se calentaba mucho, pero me deje guiar por algunas opiniones que decían que no pasaba nada si la carcasa no llegaba a quemar los dedos. A los pocos días comenzó a desconectarse de forma intermitente y llegó un momento que no funcionaba así que lo devolví. Por suerte el SSD interno que le puse no se estropeó, y le puse una carcasa con ventilación activa con la que estoy muy contento

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

Pas sur que ça soit gênant mais le boîtier devient extrêmement chaud au toucher. J’ai monté un WD Black SN850X 4Go

I tested it with Kingston KC3000 SSD, and got to over 3000 MB/s read and write on both PC and Mac. So it works as expected. It comes with a cloth carrying case, 2 screws and 2 sets of thermal pads - thumbs up for that. Heat dissipation is so so. I find it a bit hot, not sure if it will affect the SSD lifespan or something. The only real disadvantage is the short cable, which is also a bit stiff.