Drive docks and bays that offer the ability to conveniently clone and manage your data between hard drives have been around forever, offering solutions for 2.5″ and 3.5″ drive formats, and both HDD and SSD. However, NVMe is starting to really make waves in the market as consumers become educated to their advantages and of course their recent price drops. However, there aren’t any specific cloning solutions for consumers that are similar to some of these docks. You can’t just slap two NVMe cards into a dock and click on a hard-based clone button. At least, not yet. However, there are ways of doing it using what’s out there, and we found one with OWC’s Express 4M2 enclosure.
Normally, an external enclosure is for tasks like combining drives into a RAID configuration, using it as a massive external storage solution. That is of course what this enclosure is for as well. However, you do not have to set everything up as RAID. If you simply place each drive/card into the enclosure and plug it into your system, each drive will show up as its own storage device, just like it would if you installed them into your main board’s M.2 slots.
So from here on out, you can use it just like that, you can RAID them together using software (which is a different story to go about entirely and won’t be included here) or you can use software to clone partitions or whole drive images from drive to drive just like they were (again) installed within your main board.
Given, this may not be the most cost-effective way of cloning your NVMe drives, but for now it is one of the most durable solutions out there (until actual cloning docks make their way into the market). Plus, you can use it as an external enclosure after, like it was meant for.
Also, keep in mind that this solution is for PCIe NVMe drives, and not SATA. This enclosure only supports the first and not the latter, and that is fine when you consider the fact that SATA M.2 solutions aren’t going to be around for long with PCIe NVMe taking them on so hard speed-wise. Also, important to point out that this is a TB3 (Thunderbolt 3) solution, and your system or laptop has to support TB3 for this to work.
The process
This is really quite easy, and OWC provides a wonderful enclosure for your NVMe drives in general. Not only is this things easy to work with, but their focus on quality materials is always noticeable in the products they bring to the market. Well manufactured aluminum chassis, a built-in fan to keep your drives cool, and electronics that both look and feel as though they will last the entire lifetime of TB3 and then some.
All you need is a small phillips head screwdriver for this. There are two thumbscrews on the back of the unit that allow you to open it and slide the shell off. Then the fan assembly has two small screws you use the screwdriver on. The assembly pops right off and you immediately have access to the four M.2 slots. Insert whatever drives you want to work with, and put it all back together.
You need to plug it into wall power and then to your system via the TB3 cable (your system can be actively running when you do this as TB3 is the same as USB). It powers on as soon as the TB3 connection is made. Once your system has identified the TB3 enclosure (your TB3 software/drivers may ask you to allow it to have access for security purposes), all of your drives will be available to both your OS’s drive management options as well as any third-party software.
There are many popular applications out there, like Macrium Reflect, Paragon, and Acronis True Image. We tend to use Acronis a lot around here, as well as Macrium. We also have had a lot of experience with EaseUS which has a free solution (EaseUS Partition Master) to work with. So we used Acronis, Macrium and EaseUS when testing this solution out.
We wound up cloning a number of drives from drive to drive, and then a couple of tests with multi-drive cloning. All of which worked perfectly, including OS drives (with Windows 10 installed). At least all of them but one, however it came from a Dell laptop and had a bunch of encrypted partitions (ie, Dell recovery partition) in which would have failed no matter how we tried to copy it, unless we decrypted those partitions or removed them via the host machine first.
Thanks to the fact that you are using TB3 for the process, you also have access to the speeds that NVMe is known for, which only makes the process quicker.
So thus far, this enclosure has been working as a solid solution for cloning. We will be wiping some of the drives and finding other clone scenarios to see if we hit a wall, but so far this is looking pretty good. As mentioned, you can of course use it as an external PCIe M.2 solution if you don’t want to open your system for each install, or if your system doesn’t have any M.2 ports, or if you have already filled what M.2 ports it has. So the final verdict is that this enclosure is a tank for whatever you need it for. The fact that it has a fan and not just a metal spreading solution is all the better.
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