{"id":208,"date":"2020-12-23T17:31:03","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T17:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2021-01-03T14:10:07","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T14:10:07","slug":"nvme-to-usb-on-m1-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/2020-12\/nvme-to-usb-on-m1-mac\/","title":{"rendered":"NVMe to USB on M1 Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently purchased a new Mac mini to replace my home computer – a 2009 iMac. It was well overdue as Apple listed it as obsolete<\/a> 4 years ago.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it only comes with 256GB SSD storage as standard and Apple charges \u00a3200 extra for 512GB and \u00a3400 extra for 1TB. Very pricey! So in an attempt to save some money, I thought I would use an external drive for additional space.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t long before I settled on the idea of getting an NVMe SSD with an enclosure. This was recommended by The Verge<\/a> and seemed to offer the best price point and flexibility.<\/p>\n

For the SSD itself, I went through several sites such as Tom’s Hardware<\/a> looking for a recommendation and eventually settled on the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro<\/a>. This offered a good price\/performance ratio (at least in the UK).<\/p>\n

Now came the more tricky part – which enclose to use. Originally, I was expecting to get a Thunderbolt enclosure, but it turns out they are prohibitively expensive – especially for my use-case. It didn’t make sense to spend more on the caddy than the SSD!<\/p>\n

After trawling Amazon for a while I picked up a FIDECO M.2 NVME External SSD Enclosure. It looked very promising – 4.3 out of 5 starts with 782 ratings.<\/p>\n

However, as soon as it arrived – the fun started. While I did manage to connect and initialise the disk, immediately after starting a file transfer it detached itself from the OS. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting it, but it showed up uninitialised as a 97.86TB disk.<\/p>\n

I thought I’d try formatting it again, but I ended up with the following error:<\/p>\n

\n

Unable to write to the last block of the device. : (-69760)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This makes sense, given how big it thought<\/em> the disk is (over 90TB), and how big it actually<\/em> is (1TB).<\/p>\n

At this point, I started researching enclosures and looking around to if others had similar problems. It turns out NVMe enclosures are notoriously flakey and there are many forums threads discussing the topic.<\/p>\n

What I found is, for all the off-brand enclosures, there are three actual chips that power them:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. JMS583<\/li>\n
  2. RTL9210(B)<\/li>\n
  3. ASM2362<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Without knowing ahead of time, it seems the enclosure I first bought contained a RTL9210B<\/strong>. This does not have a lot of complaints, but it certainly didn’t work for me. I even tried upgrading the firmware to no avail.<\/p>\n

    So with that in mind, I scoured Amazon for a new enclosure with a different chipset. Specifically an ASM2362<\/strong> as the JMicron chip has lots of negative comments.<\/p>\n

    A few days later (no, I don’t have Prime) my Kafuty USB3.1 to M.2 NVME External Hard Drive Enclosure<\/a> arrived and I swapped over the SSD.<\/p>\n

    It immediately showed up in Finder but I thought I’d reinitialise it anyway. Some file transfers and speed-tests later, all was still good ?<\/p>\n

    TLDR; On my M1 Mac mini, RTL9210B was a complete failure and ASM2362 is stable<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I recently purchased a new Mac mini to replace my home computer – a 2009 iMac. It was well overdue as Apple listed it as obsolete 4 years ago. Unfortunately, it only comes with 256GB SSD storage as standard and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,15],"tags":[16,17,18,19],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-mac-os-x","category-macos","tag-apple","tag-m1","tag-nvme","tag-usb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iain.rauch.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}