Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When looking for an SSD enclosure there are two key aspects that must be considered: the chipset and the cooling. I will leave discussions of cooling to other reviewers who can put in much longer benchmarking time and will cover discussions about the chipset as well as general build quality. TLDR: This enclosure is a keeper. The three big chipsets on the market today are the JMicron JM583, the ASMedia ASM2362, and the Realtek RTL9210. This enclosure, at least the version that I have received, contains the Realtek chipset. In particular it contains a mild revision named the RTL9210B which as far as I am aware is the only chipset that supports both NVMe and SATA drives. This is fantastic news. The Realtek chipset has so far the best reputation on the market in providing stable performance with little wasted heat. The most common chipset on the market, the JMicron, has shown a lot of issues on the stability front probably caused by excessive power draw from the USB port which causes the internal drive to overheat and trigger self preservation throttling and even disconnection. Pluggable, a premium maker of another NVMe to USB product changed out it’s JMicron based enclosure to a Realtek based one after reviewing initial customer feedback. It seems that Sabrent has followed in Pluggable’s footsteps replacing their older JMicron based unit with the one we have today based on the new Realtek chip. Onto the enclosure itself, it is a ‘sandwich’ type with a permanent attachment on one end that hinges open and closed. The entire outer enclosure is made out of very stiff aluminum, so much so that I had trouble removing the internal PCB to take the pictures posted on the review. This should act as a very powerful heat sink when the drive is in heavy use. The tool less mechanism is a rubber stopper. All tolerances are very tight leading to a portable drive with no squeaks or rattles when closed. The biggest perk of a sandwich mechanism as opposed to a ‘sliding’ one is that it is very easy to apply thermal pads to hot components and make sure they make contact with the external shell which acts as the overall heat sink. A sliding mechanism cannot have full contact as then there will be no room to slide. Overall I highly recommend this product. The combination of an attractive price, wonderful build quality, and a top tier chipset cannot be matched by any other enclosure that I am aware of.