M.2 NVME Enclosures issues.

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M.2 NVME Enclosures issues.

I recently purchased a Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB SSD and planned to use it as an external drive for my 2019 13 inch Macbook Pro (2 Thunderbolt 3 ports model, updated to Big Sur) but I keep having issues with it.

The original plan was to use the ssd with a USB 3.1 enclosure rated for 10 Gbps (this one from Sabrent, which is USB 3.2 but USB 3.1 compatible). Everything seemed fine when writing small files to it, but when I partitioned it to use it as a Time Machine drive as well, it started crashing after a few seconds of writing to it. This is when I discovered that JMS583 chipset enclosures have reliability issues with MacOS, even though the enclosure works fine with my other 970 EVO Plus 500GB SSD. I decided to try and purchase a RTL9210 based enclosure, as it seemed to be working fine from what I read online, but I still have issues with it. The weird thing is that using the USB 3.2 enclosure via a USB 3.0 dock doesn't cause any issues, apart from reducing read/write speeds to 5 Gbps.

I can't wrap my head around this, the SSD seems to be ok (USB 3.0 works fine), and so does the enclosure apart from USB 3.1 mode. Is this a MacOS issue? a MacBook Pro hardware issue?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Nov 30, 2020 6:06 AM

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Answer 1

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FilBr Author

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Dec 8, 2020 4:40 AM in response to FilBr

UPDATE 2:

After almost a week of testing other SSD drives and enclosures, I can finally draw some conclusions.

Enclosures with the JMS583 chipset are definitely unreliable on Macs, by googling around seems to be a problem with new models. I guess the issue has something to do with the thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 controller since on a 2016 MacBook air I had no issues (as I didn't have any when connecting the drive via a USB 3.0 adapter).

Enclosures with the RTL9210 and ASM2362 chipsets seem to work fine (the first one I got must have been faulty on its own), the only problem being they are much harder to find as most of the enclosure use the previously mentioned JMS583 chipset. Of course, also design might impact performance (my ASM2362 had an extremely poor thermal dissipation design, causing the SSD to thermal throttle).

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Answer 2

FilBr Author

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14 points

Dec 1, 2020 2:03 PM in response to FilBr

UPDATE:

I since purchased 2 more enclosures (one with the RTL9210 chipset as I suspect the one I got was faulty, and the other one with the third available chipset, the ASM2362) and another NVME drive to test.

I got the ASM2362 enclosure today and it seems to be working fine with both the 970 EVO Plus and the 970 EVO with USB 3.1, I'll update the thread as I test more since it may be useful for future readers.

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Answer 3

Nov 30, 2020 2:09 PM in response to FilBr

I've had USB3 issues with my 2014 Mini since day one where I had to resort to using a good powered USB3 hub with my external drives. The hub acts as a filter & buffer and has prevented any other issues when using external drives.

I'm not a fan of Sabrent as I worked with one of their inexpensive enclosures years ago and was not impressed. I recommend going with brands like Plugable, StarTech, Anker, or OWC.

Don't partition your TM backup drive. You want a dedicated drive for your backups so that the backups do not get damaged. Get another drive to store other items. Besides if the items on the other partition are important & unique, then they also need to be backed up.

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Answer 4

Dec 1, 2020 4:29 PM in response to FilBr

I think all of my USB3 devices use an ASMedia chipset and I've never had any issues.

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Answer 5

FilBr Author

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Nov 30, 2020 4:00 PM in response to HWTech

USB3 isn’t really an issue in my case though, just USB 3.1 stability with certain drives. I have bought a couple of other enclosures from the brands you suggested and will test them when I get them, thank you for your suggestions. If those still fail I will try with another nvme drive and see if I can solve the issue that way.

It still is a very weird problem, especially because I’ve read reviews of people with my same model MacBook Pro, same model enclosure and same model SSD not having issues, so I can’t really understand the rationale behind this phenomenon.

As for the partitioning of the drive, I’m aware that it is in general not a good idea to keep important data on a single drive, but the storage partition is more of an offline synced version of some files I often need, already backed up to the cloud, which comes in handy since I moved into a new place with very poor internet. As for time machine, i have never used it but was trying to give it a shot, so I may change the partitioning schema of the drive (assuming I can get it to work reliably).

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M.2 NVME Enclosures issues.

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