I bought an OWC high speed NVME enclosure for my base model MacMini

[Robert Watcher]

So glad I got the OWC 1M2 thunderbolt enclosure for expanding the storage on my base model MacMini M1. Speed test resulted in superior Write Read speed to the internal MacMini SSD —— and equal speeds to my new MacBook Air M4 internal SSD. I also ran a speed test on the Crucial XPro usb-c portable SSD for storing my data while traveling with my laptop.

Last year I purchased a matching Satechi hub for my 2020 MacMini M1 base model workstation. It gave me a few extra ports on the front as well as SD reader. Another appealing feature of this hub was that it also included an internal slot for NVME / SSD sticks. This meant that I could get rid of the external usb-c Sandisk portable drive that I was using to store data on, and have everything in one nice package on my desk.

I bought what my research showed was a very fast NVME stick with 2TB storage to put inside and use as my Work drive to transfer current work in and out of the computer as quickly as possible. That was a good size storage for my purpose because I have everything including the current work, backed up to large standard HHD’s as well as everything being backed up every day to BackBlaze online storage.

The transfer speed seemed decent, but I didn’t realize how much the fast NVME was being throttled because of the limitations of the Satechi enclosure. That aside, the biggest issue I started noticing is that the NVME would regularly detach from the MacMini —— which I soon learned was a protection to the NVME because of excessive heat being produced when running heavy tasks, which for me ended up being when I try and back up the whole NVME to one of my backup drives.

I had looked at enclosures previously but the price scared me away, plus I wasn’t sure that investing that kind of money would really benefit me. When I noticed this week that the price of the OWC enclosure on Amazon was reduced by $30, I felt it was time to give it a try and protect the significant investment I already had in the NVME. After being delivered by Amazon yesterday, I decided to record some video on my iPhone of assembling it as well as run some speed tests to see how I would benefit.

Unfortunately I am quite sick with the flu and can’t speak well, so I recorded the parts I wanted to mention in Voice Memo on my iPhone, used that app to convert what I said into text and then had chatGTP change text into speech and recorded the output to add to the audio timeline in Lumafushion on my iPad Mini7. As much as I wanted to turn all sound off while exporting the video, I know that I don’t like watching videos without sound. So I chopped up the generated vocal track, and added a track of room sound as well as a track with mouse clicks and scratching noises. LOL. So the voice isn’t mine and is obviously AI generated. But hopefully the content findings are useful to some.

 

[Asher Kelman]

So bottom line, what were the two read and write speed in the two enclosures

 

[Robert Watcher]

So bottom line, what were the two read and write speed in the two enclosures

The NVME in OWC thunderbolt enclosure resulted in speeds in the area of 3,000 Mb/s with both Write and Read with both my MacMini and MacBook. That was about equal to the internal drive on my MacBook Air M4 (Thunderbolt 4) —- and twice as fast as the internal drive in my MacMini M1 (Thunderbolt 3) on the Write side (1,600 Mb/s). The Write / Read speeds with the NVME installed in the Satechi hub connected to the MacMini by usb-c, were in around 650-700 Mb/s, substantially limiting the potential of the high speed NVME.

I got this OWC / NVME combo for attachment to my desktop MacMini because I wanted to expand on the storage and have the transfer speeds to work on large files, app caches such as for on1 Photo RAW which can use up a lot of space for cataloging on my 256GB internal SSD, and run most of my apps from the external drive. I’ve always preferred to keep my computers internal drive relatively clean with just OS and essential apps or ones that are required to be on the computers drive.

Importantly for me is that my data is always safe on an external drive if the computers built in drive ever fails. If I get a new computer, I can keep running like I always have by plugging in the external drive with my apps, caches and data. Or I am able to work seamlessly between my different devices by plugging in this external drive. Those abilities are valuable to me and having a fast efficient and expandable enclosure are more useful than purchasing large SSD drives built in to my computers, unless they are a bottleneck to functionality.

I’m thinking that this OWC enclosure is future proof for a while, because I can easily pop out the 2TB NVME stick and replace it with a 4TB or even an 8TB NVME if I had the need and wanted to fork out $1,000+ for one —- although that 8TB be around the same investment as upgrading a MacMini to the same 2TB of storage that I now have in the OWC enclosure. As well the OWC enclosure would give Thunderbolt 5 for double the transfer speeds of 6.000 to 7,000 Mb/s if I ever got a machine with those ports.

My 2TB Crucial X9 Pro portable usb-c SSD that I have for super small and weatherproof convenience when traveling with 13” MacBook laptop, came in at a respectable 900 Mb/s plus or minus. I really love this little pocketable drive.

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Both the Teamgroup 2TB NVME and the Crucial X9 Pro 2TB drive cost roughly the same at a bit over $200. I don’t feel the need to spend twice as much for 4TB of either drive at this point in time. The OWC enclosure was on sale for $120 this week. There are less expensive enclosures, but I decided to pay extra to handle the extreme heat that the NVME stick produces with a workload. These are just my working external drives which I want as fast as possible. For my file backups of these Work drives as well all of my older archive of files, I have them on less expensive 4TB up to 16TB slower HHD storage drives that I don’t need to access often and can take my time with transfers.