One of my SSD enclosures is flaky. What do we like these days?

[Robert M]

RAM,

The only way to get an external drive moving as quickly as or as close to as quickly as the internal drive of your M3's internal SSD is to go with a Thunderbolt 5 external SSD with an appropriately chosen stick or a prebuilt model. However, your machine must also have Thunderbolt 5 to take advantage of the speed, which isn't the case with all models with an M3 in it. OWC has one and it's based on an excellent enclosure design:



There are other enclosures out there that can achieve wicked fast speeds but, when it comes to the initial models, I'd go with one from OWC. That and it's a _very_ well-designed solid enclosure.

The next best would be Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 enclosure and neither will be as fast as the internal SSD of any M3 based machine. However, despite that, one might be more than sufficiently fast enough for your purposes.

Robert

[RAMd®d]

Robert,

I'm well aware of everything you said, including the new OWC T5 enclosure.

But they don't sell it bare, and may not ever.

We'll see.

So until then what I have now, is as I said, as close to uber fast as I'll get, especially since my M3 MBA doesn't do T5.

Without a double SSD box with RAID hardware or software, that's as close as I'm going to get for the foreseeable future.

I know don't need uber fast, but I feel the need...

[S. Pupp]

RAMd®d wrote:
But in this case (api) the enclosure is curved so a flat silicone pad wouldn't touch the whole case completely.

Because the silicone pad is compressible, the pad makes contact with the case across its entire surface. The top is fairly flat compared to the rest of the case, which helps. The pad does not stick sliding into the case because of the matte black coating.

Evidence of its efficacy is that the temp of the case gets hotter than my other cases, and the reported temp of the SSD in Hard Disk Sentinel is lower than my other cases.