OWC 8TB Express 1M2 Portable NVMe SSD USB4 (Thunderbolt Compatible/USB-C) Ultra Fast External SSD Drive with Aluminum Heat Sink Enclosure

I am using this with a 2021 M1-Max Macbook Pro, paired with the Playstation Drive, the Western Digital Black SN850X 8TB ! IMPORTANT NOTE! I had to return the SN850X with heatsink, as you must get the naked version for use with this drive!Due to true Thunderbolt 4 support, this is the fastest external drive I've ever had with my Mac, sustaining 3 GB/sec read+write! Before this, the best I achieved was 1TB/second using those USB 3.2 drives. And unlike with a lot of ready made external drives, this one was easily formatted and partitioned in Disk Utility, with no special hoops to jump through.It's worth addressing that the size issue is absolutely not bad at all. Yes, this is about twice the size of a compact external SSD, but for true perspective, it is smaller than my iPhone 16 Pro, and because it's a sturdy aluminum case, you can stash it as is in your backpack.I use this drive for very large backups, and during my initial backup of a 3.8TB folder, which took over a half hour due to having over 5 million files, the case definitely got hot. Not serious burn hot, but "I don't really want to hold this in my hand" hot. I do not consider this an issue, as future backups will be deltas, and what you get is pure silence.( There aren't many high performance 8TB drives on the market, but I trust the SN850 to be reliable, due to its extensive track record with the Playstation 5, and it was the second cheapest 8TB SSD I found ).All in all, I think OWC really knocked it out of the park with this external drive! For a single external SSD, this is a no brainer as the best possible choice! :)

Couldn't be better. Its blazing fast and stays cool. I threw in the Western Digital WDS800T2X0E which is their 8TB black NVMe SSD card. Fits snug and great. I think its gets good contact with the enclosure to dissipate heat. I immediately transferred roughly 4TB to it and renamed all of the files. It gets a little warm, but that's it, I wouldn't say it gets hot, but I am going to have fun with it and set it on a larger aluminum heat sink as a stand and put a fan on it. I am also going to buy another one and another 8TB card so I can mirror it and have redundancy. For the price, this enclosure with an 8TB NVMe seems to be the BEST bang for the buck. And with independent enclosures for each 8TB of data I care deeply about, I will feel safe having redundancy. I'm not worried about losing a drive, only internal component failures though it hasn't ever happened to me yet. Might end up with four of these and 32TB of space for 25% the cost of a NAS or DAS system. Don't pay for cloud storage, just get a bunch of OWC products and forget about data speeds ever being a problem. This thing is plenty quick. I can actively workflow Lightroom, Topaz, and Photoshop files from this with zero issues. If OWC would sell the four-bay version of this WITHOUT their built in NVMe drives I would get one.

This enclosure delivers tops speeds and is a joy to use. Installation of my SSD (Samsung 990 Pro 2TB) was easy and quick. Both with a Mac Mini and a Macbook Air the 1M2 performed equally well. The enclosure connects with full USB-4 speed at 40Gb/s.The aluminum case gets warm to the touch when idling; under heavy load it does get noticeably warmer but never too hot to touch. So heat dissipation seems to work as intended.Images show speed tests with APFS unencrypted versus encrypted.

Remarkably fast! The internal SSD I added is from Crucial / 1 TB. I'm used to the 900+mb read/write speeds with external drives and after running disk speed tests multiple times,I can confirm this casing from OWC was the right purchase.Only nit pick from the bottom of the casing, is you only need to remove (2) small Phillip screws and slide the casing open in an upward angle. Instructions can be better in this sense. The packaging does come with a miniature Philip screwdriver and additional rubber feet which I had to use. Benchmark results = just over 3,000mb read / write speeds. Significant upgrade attached to my Mac Mini M4. I'm pleased with this result. Why did you pick this product vs others?:Reputable, Reliability. I've worked with other OWC products.

Was very simple to use and got great results. I backed up about 600GB using this enclosure to a Samsung Pro SSD and saw a max speed of about 2.5GB/s and sustained write (after the cache was full) of about 2GB/s. Very fast. It also kept the SSD cool, even without a fan. Although you can switch SSDs in the enclosure without too much difficulty, I would think doing this frequently might damage the SSD.