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M.2 enclosure recommendations for Mac Studio

gsilbers said:
A Lot of enclosures I see for more than 2 mnve have a fan. I don’t know how much heat is generated from these drives.
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My OWC Express 4M2 had a fan. I removed the entire outer casing and the fan. The four drives in that one (2xIntel, 2xWD) are not getting hot, so they are cooled by the open air.

My 980 PRO runs at 50°C in Acasis enclosure. The chassis acts like a heatsink and gets warm. Samsung says operating temperature range is up to 70°C, so I'm safe.
 
naturalahvi said:
I think it cooked itself to death. It was very hot all the time. Luckily 4TB m.2 survived. Enough trouble to buy OWC instead.
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That's interesting. As I wrote, my Acasis (with a 4TB drive) is warm to the touch but certainly not hot.

I wonder whether they updated their design because there was a problem, or maybe different drives run hotter than others.

Or maybe you just got a bad case. There are always a billion things that can go wrong in manufacturing.
 
Nick Batzdorf said:
That's interesting. As I wrote, my Acasis (with a 4TB drive) is warm to the touch but certainly not hot.

I wonder whether they updated their design because there was a problem, or maybe different drives run hotter than others.
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The case being only warm to the touch can in some scenarios be a bad sign if it means that the heat isn't being transferred to the case.
It depends on the design of the case and the drive used.
I doubt it's an issue with you as I recall you buying a premium case.
But you can see this with $15-20 cases from Amazon/eBay/China.

There is a large difference in heat output between the most and least efficient SSDs.
The first generation for a new flavour of PCIe tend to be inefficient as they are pushing the envelope.
The later drives for the same PCIe generation tend to use newer controllers and NAND, which are usually more efficient and give better performance.

The info that I've seen on the PCIe 5.0 drives that are due soon doesn't bode well for temperatures.
We are talking cooling fans with some and as a necessity.
Pointless to buy for use in an external TB enclosure for now anyway.
But TB4/TB5 sounds promising! :)
 
Nick Batzdorf: Acasis TBU401E was the model that died.

One time after "Disk Not Ejected Properly" full Thunderbolt port freeze occured. I thought first it broke the TB port on my Mac Studio. Tried to restart Mac but it freezed computer totally. After forced power off port started to function again.
Only thing what was good was speed. OWC is somewhat slower, but it is OK.
Had bad luck I guess.

What I have learned about OWC products is they never have let me down. About 10 products I have.
 
In the end I bought Orico enclosure because that what was available locally. The speeds are through CalDigit Elements Hub. The write speeds are nothing to write home about, but I will not be using it for that. I bought it mainly for the read speeds, and they are great. However, the enclosure gets relatively hot.

ORICO M208C3 M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure (40G) with Samsung EVO Plus 2TB (thermal pad on) through CalDigit Elements hub (Thunderbolt 4) into MacBook Pro M1 Max

M.2 enclosure recommendations for Mac Studio
 
Amazon product ASIN B0948TKWLS
Another member here posted about this. A little extra protection... I have two Envoy Express enclosures, each with a pair of these heatsinks attached, one on either side.

Picture is here:

Mac Studio or MacBook Pro?

I've found myself in a situation where I need to get hold of a new Mac quickly (for ongoing work with composers working in Logic). It pains me as I only bought a great new 12900K DAW PC at the beginning of last year, but needs must! My old Mac Pro Late 2013 is really on its last legs, so I'm...
vi-control.net vi-control.net
 
PeterKorcek said:
In the end I bought Orico enclosure because that what was available locally. The speeds are through CalDigit Elements Hub. The write speeds are nothing to write home about, but I will not be using it for that. I bought it mainly for the read speeds, and they are great. However, the enclosure gets relatively hot.

ORICO M208C3 M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure (40G) with Samsung EVO Plus 2TB (thermal pad on) through CalDigit Elements hub (Thunderbolt 4) into MacBook Pro M1 Max
Click to expand...
I'll add the write speed limitation is because of the Samsung 970 EVO on an M1 Mac, not the enclosure. But - as you said, read speed is more important and write speed is still good.
 
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