OWCMercury Elite Pro Mini USB C Bus-Powered External Storage

To me, an enclosure with a good 2.5" SSD in it is the best storage compromise you can make. Generally more reliable than ready made external drives. Less heat issues compared to NVME enclosures. Still more portable compared to 3.5" drives. Faster than spinning rust, and relatively affordable.I plugged a TeamGroup Vulcan 1 TB drive into my OWC enclosure. It was super easy to install, just pushed into the SATA connection. A few screws to put the enclosure back together and I was finished. I've had no issues reading it on Linux and Win11. It's fast enough that I was able to install Battlefield 2042 on the drive and game on it while plugged in to the USB-C port on my laptop.My only regret is that I probably should have equipped it with a 2tb capacity or larger. It holds plenty of data as is, but for a gaming and multimedia drive, more is always better.

Love this little enclosure. I had a couple of 2.5” SSDs that I wanted to use and this include fit the bill. Installed the drive and had in running on the computer in about 5mins.Being bus powered is another advantage in that I don’t have to worry about turning a separate item on and off.

… but, I realized that after about a month there was supposed to be a drive status LED lamp on the front right of the enclosure. My LED lamp was not working. I contacted OWC user support and received a lot of suggestions on things to try: 1) restart, 2) reset the computer PRAM, 3) reset the SMC… trouble is that Apple Silicone M1 Mac Mini the PRAM and the SMC can not be reset like the old Intel Mac days. They were well intentioned, but not very knowledgeable. With the SSD drive out and the outer case off, I began looking more closely at the wires coming from the LED to the controller, it was UNPLUGGED! It was difficult, but I was able to fiddle about with a toothpick, to align the tiny plug with the socket on the base of the controller. Once it snapped into place, all is well. Oddly, the LED plug and socket is located right beneath the Passed QC label. So much for full inspection before they slap on a QC Passed label.

Just like everything else from OWC, this is extremely high quality and high performance. No surprises. Solid metal construction. Doesn't slow down after a while like other brands do. I love it!

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.

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.

Had Samsung SSD drives in both. What are the chances that both enclosures fail within a couple weeks? As always OWC warranty process is a joke, waste of time and the out of pocket cost enormous. Just simpler to go with a different brand.