ORICO 40Gbps NVMe SSD Enclosure, M.2 to USB-C Adapter for NVMe M-Key 4TB SSD 2280, Aluminum M2 External SSD Case, Compatible with Thunderbolt 3/4 USB3.2/3.1/3.0/Type -M234-Grey

I really like and appreciate the included heat sink and heat-conductive padding. In heavy use of the drive, the case now gets fairly warm (about 50 degrees C on a MacBook), but the SSD (not included) works fine at these temps. Well made and nicely sized.

I purchased this to connect a WD Black SN850 4 TB SSD to a Mac Mini M4, Mac OS Sequoia 15.2. The first unit I received was obviously a customer return, no silicon heat transfer pad in the box. The second unit was factory sealed. Unit is difficult to assemble because the aluminum heatsink fin is grooved to slide over the SSD (not press down on top-too tight). This process is almost impossible because the silicon heat transfer pad which sits between the SSD and the heatsink is sticky and the heatsink cannot be slid over the SSD. I carefully spread the "legs" of the heatsink and snapped in down over the SSD hoping I hadn't damaged the SSD. Well I hadn't but once connected to the Mac, the enclosure cannot maintain a connection longer than a few minutes. I started a file transfer consisting of many folders and files and came back an hour later. The transfer had failed after about 40 GB of data transferred because the enclosure had disconnected and reconnected. While sitting at the computer, I am seeing frequent error messages stating Disk Not Ejected Properly even though I'm not seeing the drive disappear from the desktop. Anyway, this product is poorly designed for assembly and isn't useable for me due to it's inablility to stay mounted.

All-n-all this enclosure is one of the best if not the best value for the money - It does work beautifully with a 4TB nmve SSD and does not overheat - My only issue with it is, that using the USB-C one must bend the USB-A rubber strap hard because some ports are seated deeper in the system and the rubber gets in the way. If they made a groove to accommodate the rubber strap to move into that would work flawlessly.

I purchased a orico m234c3-u4 and installed a Western Digital 4 TB SN850X NVMe drive. I connected it using Thunderbolt 4 port, initialized it, created a single simple GPT partition and formatted it exFat. It works great and is blazing fast when connected via Thunderbolt, but when I connect via USB-C, it acts like the disk isn't partitioned. If I try to initialize/partition/format via USB connection, I get an error and the operation fails. I've tried via Disk Manager, AOMEI Partition Assistant, and via command line. I sent a message to Orico Tech Support, but never heard back from them. After researching the chips used in the device, I believe that the issue is that the Thunderbolt to NVMe controller that they use will work with 4 TB drives, but the USB to NVMe controller has a maximum drive limit of 2 TB. Since I installed and partitioned a 4TB drive, I'm only able to access / utilize it over Thunderbolt.I'm willing to live with this because I really want the 4TB size and the incredible speed offered by this enclosure, but the inability to use the drive via USB for computers without Thunderbolt is really disappointing. If I could purchase a different enclosure without that problem, I definitely would.On a side note, the top of the included NVMe heat transfer cover doesn't touch the aluminum enclosure cover when installed. In order to improve heat dissipation, I purchased thermal pads that I placed between the heat transfer cover and the enclosure cover. ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0BQJGY7H4 )

Speeds are as advertised for a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo (I bought the 10Gbps version), controller seems to do its thing well enough, and the drive is recognized in by Samsung Magician software as a Samsung drive (unlike the equivalent Sabrent enclosure I tried that does not apparently enable this).The problems are with the design of the enclosure. The SSD is installed in a way that results in its chips transferring their heat to the flat underside of the enclosure, which is weird, but since the entire enclosure is aluminum it should still dissipate heat throughout the entire case. Not an ideal design and I've no idea why Orico essentially designed the internals upside down, but it should still do the job.The biggest problem is with the metal sleeve that is supposed to fit over the drive and thermal pad, and then makes contact with the external case for heat transfer: it is designed with grooves for the drive to slide into it, but the thermal pad supplied has adhesive on both sides so once applied you cannot slide anything. I had to bend the outer edges of the metal sleeve so it could just drop on top of the drive and make proper contact with the pad, otherwise it would sit on the drive at an angle so only half the pad made contact with it. The solution would be to either make the sleeve fractionally wider, or provide a thermal pad that's adhesive only on one side.So it works OK overall as a drive enclosure, is physically solid, and looks nice, but the internals for mounting the drive are poorly designed and could be a lot better.

I have a Sabrent Rocket 4 2TB NVMe drive mounted inside this enclosure with the included Thunderbolt 4 certified cable to a Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 port on a MacBook Pro. It achieves 2.5-3.0 GB/ps in benchmarks. I have never seen throttling or heat issues, even when I filled it about 3/4 full initially. It is so much faster than SATA, HDD, and older SSDs that I've had that I question if I would ever want something faster. I hope they are still making and selling this the next time I need an external NVMe enclosure.