Looking for a m.2 USB 3 enclosure, doesn’t matter if it’s 5 or 10G, that has support for SMART and does TRIM. If it’s aluminum, even better, but I don’t care for the aesthetics that much. My old m.2 enclosure didn’t report smart info at all and didn’t support TRIM. If possible, it should connect via a Type-C cable.
This Sabrent model supports TRIM. Unfortunately mine is packed away at the moment so I can’t test to see if I can get SMART data.
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Bump.
I use this one with the RTL9210, but I don’t have a free NVME to check S.M.A.R.T. functionality.
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Personally I’ve become a fan of Dockcase enclosures. They have a capacitor that gives 5 or 10 seconds of power when power is cut, and apparently also send a “shut down safety NOW” signal to the drive. USB connections do NOT like movement, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an A or C connector.
I’ve found them more reliable over all compared to other enclosures (even ones with the “better” controllers or newer firmware), to the point where I can run a “Windows To Go” install off of one. (If you do this, make sure you have a functional automatic backup system in place). Come to think of it, I’ve also not had any issues that have made me suspect an overheating controller either.
As always, it’s good to be aware of how to power cycle SSDs, in the event they become unresponsive after a power loss event. I’ve not had to do this with anything in a dockcase enclosure yet though.
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They call it Smart, but idk if they also mean S.M.A.R.T..
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I would suggest the orico Dual-bay M.2 NGFF SATA SSD Enclosure (orico.cc). It’s not a nvme enclosure but a SSD. This enclosure allows you to put 2 SSD in it and make raid 0,1… For me, I put on raid 0 and put some game on it.
I use the ugreen ones with great success…
I have 1 as a vm storage drive and one as a regular usb storage style both have been super reliable compared to anything else I have used
It’s a cool enclosure, but I’m looking to put my NVME drives to better use, so I need NVME. Also, no hardware raid for me, thanks (although I’m guessing they’re just using md, not writing their own raid firmware - or they could license raid firmware from big names in the game, but I find that a bit less likely).
I have a USB NVME enclosure that I used reliably for more than 3 years daily, with my then daily driver, a raspberry pi. The only unreliability was the Pi’s power delivery when I plugged once or twice a USB HDD into it (taking power from all other USB devices).
The m.2 in the USB enclosure served as the rootfs. And even with the drive basically being underfed, I never had a file corruption at all. The controller on it was solid. Just that it didn’t support trim or smart, which kinda annoyed me that I couldn’t monitor the SSD health. I wasn’t writing and deleting files intensively or anything, so the ssd wasn’t getting hammered or anything.
In fact, I’m still using the same 256gb nvme to this day, in my odroid h3+. This thing has been through 3 or 4 pcs and still going strong.
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 49 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 37%
Data Units Read: 17,806,731 [9.11 TB]
Data Units Written: 55,408,173 [28.3 TB]
Host Read Commands: 375,061,836
Host Write Commands: 3,399,816,989
Controller Busy Time: 17,739
Power Cycles: 521
Power On Hours: 35,286
Unsafe Shutdowns: 289
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 74
Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 86
Thermal Temp. 1 Transition Count: 61
Thermal Temp. 2 Transition Count: 19
Thermal Temp. 1 Total Time: 4389
Thermal Temp. 2 Total Time: 11376
Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 256 entries)
No Errors Logged
If I’m reading this right, this SSD has seen 112x of its total size in writes (i.e. has been overwritten 112 times, although obviously some parts of the flash have seen less writes, where the OS data or non-changing files reside). Also, lmao @ the power on cycles, 4 years uptime (I used to keep my PC up all the time, rebooting every month or two - in fact, most Power On cycles have been since a few months ago, maybe 4 or 5, since I started properly powering off my PC when I’m not using it).
The unsafe shutdowns are probably from the m.2 enclosure, when I was rebooting, as the USB just “loses power” instead of getting a proper shutdown signal (probably why you’d want the caps-based enclosures, assuming they also have a safe-shutdown NVME command in the firmware for when power is lost).
Case in point, I could not see SMART stats on my old enclosure, I want one that supports that, particularly if I’m going to use any of my nvme drives through USB again.
I’ll have to research all the options I’ve been given, to see if they support SMART and TRIM commands, since nobody checked theirs if they did. 
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Out of curiosity, does anyone know a gen 2x2 with confirmed support? The gen 2x1s that have already been mentioned cover many of the more promising candidates I’m aware of but 2x2 isn’t as well documented. Akasa and Silverstone specify UASP so, as I understand it, SMART passthrough and (in principle) TRIM should work.
Startech explicitly supports TRIM in 2x1 but doesn’t do 2x2. Orico specifies UASP on several of their 2x1s but not their 2x2s and doesn’t mention TRIM that I can find.
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