p.2 #1 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
I don't know what they use now, but a few years ago I tried one of the top TLC Sabrent M.2 SSDs. It was a relative power hog, not what what I prefer to use in a host-powered enclosure. Besides looking at the peak power, there can be current spikes that cause dropouts if the enclosure, cable, and host are inadequate.
In general I disdain the M.2 form factor, but that's the consumer format we are stuck with.
p.2 #2 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
Jack Flesher wrote:
I just got an M4 Studio and am looking at a combo on Amazon -- a Sabrent Rocket 5 NVME in the ANYOYO TB5 enclosure. This ANYOYO box looks to be a clone of the ACASIS TB5 at $65 less cost. Anybody tried it?
I am currently using a 4 year old Sabrent TB3 enclosure with Sabrent Rocket (2?) NVME and get sustained Read and Write at around 1300 mb/s now, while when new it was around 1700. I suspect the SSD is wear-leveling. That said, this combo has worked reliably and still is; and if I'm completely honest with myself, it's plenty fast for my current uses which is primarily my current year of still images for processing. Of course it's backed up to a spinning array.
Point here is do I wait to see if some breakthrough TB5 enclosure shows up, or just go with what's available now? ...Show more →
If you don't really need TB5 speed, then IMO ~$250-300 for a TB5 enclosure is a bit overkill compared to ~$75 for TB4. TB4 will still give you around 3GB/s transfer speed, but how long that can be sustained will depend on the SSD and its cache implementation. Putting a PCIe 5 drive like the Sabrent in it would obviously not allow the Sabrent to reach peak transfer rates, but it might be able to sustain transfers at the peak TB4 rate, whereas other drives may slow down as their caches fill. But this may depend on the Sabrent's cache size. I haven't seen any benchmarks for it, so am not sure what it's post-cache sustained write speed is.
I'd be inclined to not be cutting edge to get better bang for the buck. Get a decent PCIe 4 SSD and put it in a TB4 enclosure. Eventually TB5 and PCIe 5 prices will come down to where TB4 and PCIe 4 are now.
Throughput speed of your existing SSD could be affected by available space and how that SSD's cache is implemented. As the drive fills, there is less free space to allocate to cache, meaning it might have a short 'burst' of higher throughput before it slows down to a steady rate.
Regarding the Sabrent Rocket 5, I found the following at Tom's Hardware:
"The Sabrent Rocket 5 has the distinction of providing the fastest direct-to-TLC write performance we have ever seen. During the longest of workloads, it can average write speeds of 4.45 GB/s, outclassing any PCIe 3.0 drive in existence and beating our previous high points with TLC flash with either 4.0 or 5.0 SSDs."
So it would appear that it may maintain sustained write at max TB4 throughput, but you would pay a premium for the drive (which you could later put in a TB5 enclosure if you needed the higher performance).
Here's a more in-depth review of the Rocket 5 by Tom's Hardware.
Of interest:
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.
We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for over 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.
The 2TB Rocket 5 writes in pSLC mode at 12.4 GB/s for 18 seconds with a 210GB cache. This is much smaller than what is possible, but it's large enough to ensure peak write performance in the most common tasks.
After the cache is exhausted, the drive writes directly to the TLC flash at up to 4.5 GB/s with steady state performance pegged at 4.45 GB/s. This is an excellent result, and in fact it’s the fastest drive we’ve ever tested. Sabrent may have introduced some firmware optimizations to get the most out of this flash.
Although the drive is capable of emptying the pSLC cache in the background, host I/O is given priority and eventually the lack of free native TLC flash space catches up to it. After this, the drive enters a folding state where it writes at 1.7 GB/s. This is still pretty fast. Folding performance is usually less than half of the direct-to-TLC speed as the drive is forced to wait as data is transferred from pSLC to TLC, which consists of already-written data needing an extra pSLC write and read in comparison. This lines up pretty well with our results.
Something noted in the review is need for suitable cooling:
These drives also put out a decent amount of heat, so it becomes important to dissipate that heat to avoid throttling of the drive. We are not running the Rocket 5 bare or as-is, but with a passive heatsink with sufficient airflow. In our sustained write testing the Rocket 5 hit a peak of 71°C, which is significantly below the first throttling point. With appropriate cooling, this drive should have no trouble even in a higher ambient.
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Takeaway here is you may benefit from the actively cooled TB5 enclosure, if its miniature fan actually works. It's unclear if passive cooling through the enclosure itself is sufficient to avoid temperature related throttling.
I'd still be inclined to just go with TB4 and a PCIe 4 SSD for the time being as best balance of performance and cost until TB5 and PCIe 5 drop in price.
p.2 #7 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
A small update for general info. I went ahead and decided to upgrade my older TB3 enclosure with the ACASIS TB4 TBU405 AIR, about $50 on Amazon. I am MAC only and this box works fine on both my M4/TB4 laptop and M4/TB5 Studio. I paired this box with the WD black 7100 Gen 4 2TB stick, $130, since it's a remote drive only.
My old 2TB stick is an older Sabrent Rocket Blue label. In the old Sabrent tool-less TB3 case the Sabrent drive managed sustained R/W of 1280/1270 mbs. The new drive in the ACASIS TB4 box runs 2600/2600, so a worthy and reasonable "budget" $180 upgrade to me for the 2x increase in I/O.
Of course curiosity got me, and I ran the old Sabrent stick in the new case just to see. Surprisingly (at least to me), the old drive in the new box ran 2000/2500. It didn't take me long to order a second ACASIS box
p.2 #8 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
If you're doing big file transfers that write speed should drop after a while, once the cache fills. But I agree, I had been using the WD SN850X initially in USB enclosures that only allowed ~1GB/s. After switching to the ACASIS TBU405, it was nice to get almost 3x faster throughput. And now when backing up to HDDs at ~200MB/s it feels like molasses.
p.2 #9 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
rscheffler wrote:
If you're doing big file transfers that write speed should drop after a while, once the cache fills. But I agree, I had been using the WD SN850X initially in USB enclosures that only allowed ~1GB/s. After switching to the ACASIS TBU405, it was nice to get almost 3x faster throughput. And now when backing up to HDDs at ~200MB/s it feels like molasses.
I'm very pleased with the TB4 throughput on the devices and it is key for reliability that they are formatted in APFS. Backing up to HDD's is painful and since I work in both OS and Windows, my HDD's are formatted in exFAT and work fine without issues.
p.2 #10 · TB4/5 external SSD enclosures which actually work with M4 mini or studio
Spinners definitely feel s..l..o..w after even TB3 nvme. TB4/gen4 a noticeable 2x speed boost. TB5, at least to my CFx cards is insanely fast, like 5-6gbs sustained transfer.
