Kingwin USB-C (3.1) to M.2 NVMe External Enclosure Adapter

NVMe is (and will continue to be) the most popular drive solution right now, thanks to the incredible speeds you can achieve using these drives when compared to normal SATA SSD and HDD. As prices continue to fall into a much more comfortable range, they seem to be leaving the shelves quicker than ever thanks to just about every modern motherboard supporting NVMe one way or another. If you lack the support natively, you can at least go with an external solution, which is exactly what we get to cover in this story.

If you do lack native support, or you only have one M.2 slot on your board and need to connect another drive for additional NVMe storage or you are looking to clone to a new drive, you can take advantage of the high-speed ports on your system to accomplish this. Thanks to connections like USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3, you can achieve speeds worthy of NVMe and come close to the performance of a native M.2 slot riding on your PCIe bus. Recently, we covered a great opportunity for taking these drives external for the purposes of storage and cloning using a Thunderbolt 3 port. Of course, with Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) you also get a higher price tag, and that solution might not be the affordable choice for all. This is where USB-C 3.1 (or Type-C) comes into play, as well as a wonderful solution from Kingwin.

We have covered Kingwin before in the past with one of our favorite affordable hard drive docks with built-in cloning support. To this day we still use it in benchmarks against other products and have used it to save a number of drives that came close to failing (we go through a lot of drives here). However, it only supports SATA drives, which leaves you wondering what to do now that we have M.2 NVMe. For this, you have Kingwin’s USB-C to M.2 NVMe External Enclosure Adapter, which turns a single NVMe drive into an external USB drive solution instantly. No drivers, no softer, just plug and play like any other USB drive.

It is much more affordable than a TB3 solution (currently), making it much more friendly on the pockets for the average consumer who isn’t looking to spend hundreds just to take a single drive or two external. Of course, you don’t get the same speeds as TB3 with USB-C, but you won’t notice much difference since NVMe can’t push the speeds greater than what USB-C can handle (up to 10Gbps) anyway.

The enclosure is a simple solution and small in size. Not much larger than the NVMe drive itself (literally), this keeps the foot print as small as physically possible. Just less than 4 inches in length and 3/8 inch thick, it fits in a pocket perfectly which makes it great for taking an NVMe drive mobile, giving you one hell of a mobile storage device (normal thumb drives, eat your heart out).

Putting it all together is as easy as removing a few screws, sliding the board out, inserting the drive, screwing it down (like normal), sliding the board back in, and putting the screws back. They even include a tiny little screwdriver for those tiny little screws. Now slap the USB cable (provided) into the port, and the other end into your computer, and it will see it as a normal external drive.

In our tests, we were easily able to achieve speeds past 500MB/s, inching into the 900’s using various drives, including Kingston A1000, Samsung’s EVO 800 Samsung’s 960 EVO, and so on. At times (brief moments), we would see burst speeds higher than that. However, files transferred so quickly in these scenarios, it is difficult to maintain such speeds for a longer period of time. To pull these speeds off, were transferred data between NVMe solutions and were quite pleased.

NVMe drives do get hotter than SATA SSD solutions, so the enclosure does get warm to the touch but not hot. Since it is an aluminum enclosure, it does help to speed heat away from the drive a tad. Just a tad though since the drive itself doesn’t make direct contact to the aluminum through a thermal pad solution or anything. So the heat is simply coming from inside or where the board (that the drive is inserted into) is making contact to the enclosure. It does run hotter than it would inside your system where fans are helping to spread heat around and out with, however we still only saw around 10 degrees difference (it runs up to 111 degrees F, where the average internal NVMe drives we have running on systems here run upwards of about 98 depending on load).

If you plan to hook the drive up and keep it in one spot vs mobile, you could always affix a heat sink solution to the enclosure to maybe draw some additional heat away–if you want to get OCD like we did in the above image. We found that the heatsinks underneath had the most impact, allowing to lift the enclosure off the desk surface for air to move beneath it freely, and those sinks to draw heat from the bottom away all the same as the top. We were able to bring the average temperature to around 98-100 degrees F by doing this (not bad). The top black heatsink was affixed with thermal tape, and bottom ones using thermal pads similar to what you’d find in electronics like gaming consoles.

Beyond that, everything heat-wise seems normal for what it is.

Our Conclusion

We found this drive enclosure to be a great option for taking NVMe external with. Not only is setup as simple as it gets, but so is its size–not much larger than the drive itself, making it perfect to slide into your pocket while on the go. It worked with every NVMe model we tested it with, and were able to get speeds far past 500MB/s (bursting into the 900’s or greater at times). It also doesn’t get too hot to the touch, so there is no thermal concerns either. This seems to be quite a formidable solution for taking these drives external with, resulting in quite a positive score in the end.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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