OWCMercury Elite Pro Mini USB C Bus-Powered External Storage

I had a SSD lying around and wanted to use it as portable storage (instead of a flash drive). I received this unit and I was very surprised at the quality. It's precision grade aluminum with logo on front. The wired connection sits firmly in place with no looseness (does not wiggle around). I tested the drive with usb-c, and it performed very well (568 MB/s using diskmark).

If you're shopping by price you could probably do better. That's fine. I've had good luck with OWC enclosures so I grabbed one of these for the MANY redundant backups I keep. Old spinning disc drives still have some value, maybe not as fast but in a worst-case scenario I don't care about speed. Used DriveDX to find a decent 2TB drive from the pile and put it in, no issues.It's all probably for naught but all it took was a single external drive enclosure somehow killing a HDD and itself so I stick with brands that haven't failed me. That event over a decade ago has driven home the importance of regular, redundant backups on trusted hardware. Never again.This is made of typical extruded aluminum body, basic construction and assembly, nothing special. Vented end looks pretty, comes with a decent cable.Not sure what the max speeds are but I'll post a screenshot of BlackMagic with Seagate Barracuda 2.5" 5400 RPM HDD. Your results may be higher with an SSD? This is plugged directly into the back of an M2 Mac Mini via TB cable.Long story short: I'll be plugging this in at regular intervals for backups, bus powered, probably not a speed demon but does the job.

After all was said and done this turned out to be a nice, little enclosure. It's small, well built, snappy and stays cool so far.Installing a Crucial 4TB MX500 drive wasn't what OWC's video made it out to be. Their video simply shows their drive connecting to the board easily. The Crucial on the other hand required disconnecting the board, plugging it into the drive then reconnecting the board to the enclosure. No big deal really, just expect it and have a small Torx or Allen wrench on hand. Knowing what to expect I'd purchase another.

I bought 3 of this to use with Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SATA SSDs on my Mac Studio. It shows its maximum speed performance as already known. Good design, best performance, and cheap. I would recommend this to Mac users surely.

This enclosure was a breeze to mount an 8TB SSD in and allows the full speed of the SATA SSD. Even faster than it should be as long as you are connected to USB 3.2. With ATTO I saw maximum speeds of 525 MB/sec writes and 567 MB/sec reads on block sizes over 64K.The aluminum case works well as a heatsink. When transferring 200GB of files the case did get slightly warm showing that it works.I would recommend this for an external drive. Much better than several cheaper ones I have.

Easy to assemble and worked perfectly. I would have to say there might be a short learning curve if you haven't done this before. Very satisfied.

The enclosure is actually nicer looking than the product photos,Given the potential 10GB speed with the USB-C connection and the lightweight but adequate case, I'd say this is a great value. I do like it.OTOH, the tiny screws can be a bit frustrating during the installation of an SSD.

I know I could have bought something cheaper but the OWC stuff looks better and this one comes with a USB-C adapter tethered to the cable. I’m using it with an SSD for Time Machine backups so I’m not too concerned about speed. When installing the drive into this enclosure, there isn’t much wiggle room, but I appreciate the small footprint. It’s a great product from OWC.