UGREEN 40Gbps M.2 NVMe Enclosure with Cooling Fan, Anti-Drop SSD Enclosure for MacBook, Aluminum M.2 Enclosure Support M/B+M Key Size 2280/2260/2242/2230 Compatible with Thunderbolt 3/4/USB4/3.2/3.1

This enclosure is pretty nice. The fan actually moves some air which one of the main reasons I purchased it. I put a Crucial P310 in it, which aspirationally can hit 7100 MBps reads. In this enclosure I saw closer to one of the images of 3000-3500 MBps reads and 2000-2600 MBps writes.Installation was simple and the tiny screw driver needed to open it and secure the SSD was included.Performance was acceptable on both Windows 11 and Mac with windows being slightly faster.The device came with a high speed USB-C to USB-C cable that was able to hit those speeds. It performed just as well as my TB4 cables. It also came with a USB-C to USB-A cable that I did not test.With this and the SSD used for testing being Prime Day purchases and heavily discounted I am happy with the cost as well.

This is the beast external SSD drive hub! it works flawlessly with MacOS and Windows computer, the speed is insane when connected with either, thunderbolt or USB-C. It was pretty much plug and play. I use it in my Mac Studio M2 Max for running my virtual sound libraries with no glitches. A also using this to run my virtual computers on my Windows laptop. Ugreen products are high quality, I haven't tried one and not like it!

Using it with an M1 Max MacBook Pro.I bought two and loaded one with 4TB NvME SSD and the other with a 1TB, both 3x4 PCIE, from Crucial.The design is okay, I don’t love the silicon bumper but it’s easy enough to remove. The material is dense enough to pickup a fair amount of heat from the SSD.The fan is audible, but not obnoxiously so.With the 4TB, using the included USB-C cable, I did a full Time Machine backup to the 4TB, about 1TB in total; I should have assumed something was wrong because the backup failed 4 times I the process (Time Machine can recover from a failed backup).When I try to restore the backup to the computer, the transfer makes it about 500GB in and the enclosure randomly disconnects.I tried several different cables and it failed consistently in the same way.I was eventually able to complete a transfer of the backup file to another USB/SATA SSD but only by using a cable that connected at 20Gbps—I verified in System Profiler.There seems to be an issue with the enclosure connecting at 40Gbps, as all of the failures occurred under this condition. Perhaps there is more heat generated at the higher speed?Also, the fan only seems to take care of the connectivity chipset, it doesn’t cool the SSD.One star because the disconnects are absolutely unacceptable.

I’m quite impressed. The materials are top-notch, and it feels incredibly premium in your hand—definitely not one of those flimsy enclosures you’d worry about breaking after a few uses. For day-to-day usage, it works flawlessly.That said, I did encounter a downside: the cooling performance. If you’re transferring large amounts of data in one go, the enclosure struggles to dissipate the heat generated by the SSD. While this is likely an edge-case scenario for most users, it’s worth noting if your workflow involves heavy read/write operations.For regular use, this enclosure is a fantastic choice. But if you frequently deal with large data transfers, you might want to explore other options with better cooling capabilities.

I started off with the Acasis Thunderbolt 4 enclosure. I can confirm that the Acasis unit does indeed have a Thunderbolt 4 compatible board, and the UGreen does not. However, my testing didn't show a huge difference in speeds, at least not enough to justify the trade off in thermals.The Acasis unit got VERY hot. The included thermal pad is not thick enough to reach the top aluminum plate, and I assume they do this as the Acasis seems to be geared more towards swapping NVME's regularly, vs the UGreen which seems to be geared toward installing once, and that NVME living in the enclosure long term (tools vs tool-less).The operational temp for most NVME SSD's is technically 30*C-72*C (86*F-161*F). In the Acasis, even at idle, I would clock the enclosure up at 120*F, and the drive with the top plate removed at 123*F. Under a blackmagic stress test, I could easily get the drive up to 155*F and enclosure up to 162*F.While that is within the margin of safety, and the enclosure is obviously dissipating heat as it was hotter than the drive itself, that was just too close to max temps for my comfort and I really think long term that the drive would not live very long.Now on to the UGreen. The design is MUCH better. The fan does do something. It doesn't pass air over the SSD itself, it moves air from under the SSD and over the enclosures main board. The big difference is the UGreen has a solid copper to plate, and the included thermal pad is thick enough that on a standard NVME drive it brings the height up to the height of the rest of the enclosure (you can see it in photo 2) and the NVME makes DIRECT contact with the copper plate.The temperature readings I took were after running blackmagic 5GB stress test for 10 minutes straight. The second photo at 92.3F is of the lower end of the NVME, the 108*F is the upper end. The memory modules themselves were in the 92-95*F area, well within my comfort zone.Overall, I'm much more happy with this unit over the Acasis. I think the Acasis could work if you went and got a thicker thermal pad, but I love the aesthetics of the UGreen, and in my use case, this is a drive that will always live in the enclosure, so having a screw to keep it installed is actually a pro for me. I skipped the included rubber wrap as NVME's aren't going to be damaged by shock or vibration, and I don't care if the enclosure anodizing gets scratched.Blackmagic test results done on a Macbook with thunderbolt 4 capabilities, although it is falling back to USB 3.4 due to the controller in the UGreen not supporting Thunderbolt 4. Still plenty fast for me, and way faster than any off the shelf external SSD offering.