Best SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures

Internal storage drives were designed to connect to the SATA or M.2 interfaces inside a PC. But with an SSD or hard drive enclosure, you can turn one into a portable backup device that connects via USB. Whether you want to give an old drive new life by turning it into external storage, buy a new SSD so you can turn it into an external drive yourself to save some money, or you just need to plug your new SSD into a USB port so you can clone your system onto it, getting the right enclosure is important.

Depending on the type of storage you are enclosing and how fast you want the connection to be, an SSD or hard drive enclosure will cost anywhere from $10 to $199. While most SSD enclosures do nothing more than protect your drive, dissipate heat, and convert the interface to USB, some also have extra bells and whistles, like a screen to show status, or extra ports for connecting other devices. To help you choose, we’ve tested more than a dozen different models.

If you don’t have a spare drive or don’t want to deal with installing an internal drive into an enclosure, you can get one of the best external SSDs from our tested list. But you can sometimes save money by going the DIY route of buying an enclosure and installing your own drive. Plus, you can always upgrade the drive to a higher-capacity model, without having to buy a new enclosure.

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Best M.2 SSD Enclosure for Most People

Most M.2 enclosures require screw drivers to both secure the lid and to hold the drive in place, which is a hassle if you have to install a drive once and a tremendous headache if you plan to do it over and over again. Because of its seamless tool-free design, relatively low price and solid 10 Gbps performance, the Sabrent EC-SNVE is the best M.2 SSD enclosure for most people. It also promises to support both SATA and NVMe drives, but we only tested with the latter as those are the much more common type of M.2 SSDs and what we use in our tests.

Sabrent's EC-SNVE has the most seamless tool-free design of any enclosure we tested. A button on the side pops the top open, allowing the lid to fold back up to 180 degrees while staying attached to the rest of the gray aluminum chassis.

That's better than the Plugable Tool-Free NVMe enclosure's design, which forces you to slide its cover all the way off where you could potentially lose it or try to put it back on the wrong way. The EC-SNVE also has a built-in thermal pad attached to the inside of the lid so it transfers heat from the SSD to the metal chassis. In our use, it snapped closed really easily and flipped open without requiring a hard button push.

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Once the enclosure is open and you slide in the M.2 drive, you can hold it in place by turning a captive fastener so it holds the SSD in place. The captive fastener only works for 2280 sized SSDs, but there's a rubber fastener you can insert in holes for 2260, 2242 and 2230 SSDs.

The EC-SNVE performed reasonably well on our performance tests. Though it was usually a few points behind the Plugable enclosure, it was within striking distance and sometimes ahead. On DiskBench, it read and wrote at a solid 811 and 538 MBps, and on CrystalDiskMark, its 4K Q32 Read and writes of 247 and 249 MBps were the fastest of all 10 Gbps enclosures.

Best 2.5-inch SSD / Hard Drive Enclosure for Most People

The market is full of inexpensive 2.5-inch SATA enclosures, but Sabrent’s EC-USASP stands out thanks to a couple of unusual features and a nice, but subtle design. The black plastic case easily popped open and snapped closed for us, with no struggling and no tools necessary. The interior has room for a 2.5-inch SSD or hard drive that’s either 7.5 or 9mm thick (the two common thicknesses). There are no screws necessary to hold the drive in place.

The Sabrent EC-USASP has an on / off switch, something you won’t find on most SSD enclosures but a nice convenience if you want to leave it plugged in but only power it on when you need it. Most 2.5-inch SATA enclosures have USB 3.0 micro B as their output port and come with USB Type-A to micro B cables. However, the EC-USASP has a USB 3 Type-A port (5 Gbps) and comes with a Type-A to Type-A cable. So, if you are planning to connect the enclosure to a laptop that has only Type-C ports, you can use a USB Type-A to Type-C cable (something many people have lying around the house) to do so.

Connected to our test laptop and with our test SATA SSD inside, the enclosure allowed us to write 25GB of files at 284.4 MBps and read at 340.2 MBps, which was among the fastest speeds we got from a SATA enclosure. We also liked the blue status light, which offers just a light touch of bling to an otherwise staid design.

Best USB 4 / Thunderbolt Enclosure

We tested two other USB4 enclosures alongside this model from Ugreen: a more expensive but similarly designed model from OWC, and a tool-free option from Cable Matters. While we liked the tool-free design of the latter, we weren't fond of its permanently attached cable – which could break over time, especially as it has a tendency to get caught in the door when you try to close the drive. The OWC enclosure, while it looks great wrapped in silver-finned aluminum, costs about $30 more than the Ugreen drive, which sports a similar metal shell, but in a darker gray. Both the Ugreen and OWC drives have removable cables, which may be slightly less convenient, but are a better bet if you want to keep using your expensive enclosure for several years.

In terms of performance, we saw minimal differences between the three using our external storage testbed (which we used to test the best external SSDs) and a 4TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus as our test drive. All three enclosures delivered sequential read speeds (in CrystalDiskMark 8) of between 3714 and 3717 MBps, and sequential writes between 3624 and 3632 MBps (both well within run-to-run variance).

Next, in order to test sustained write speeds and the enclosure's ability to keep the drive cool, we put all three drives through our 30-minute Iometer write test. All three drives wrote at speeds above 3 GBps for between 135 and 142 seconds, before dropping to lower sustained speeds. But the Cable Matters enclosure throttled briefly as low as 65 MBps before hovering between 1300 and 1650 MBps for the remainder of our test, while the OWC enclosure ranged between 1400 and 1650 MBps for the majority of our test. The Ugreen enclosure, after its 135 seconds above 3 GBps, dropped to between 1600 and nearly 1800 MBps for the rest of our test run, making it the fastest of the bunch, if not by a huge margin.

The Ugreen enclosure also topped out at 107 degrees Fahrenheit during the 30-minute write test, similar to the OWC drive's 106 degrees F. The Cable Matters enclosure was the warmest during this test, at 111 degrees F. Again, these aren't huge differences, but the Cable Matters device felt noticeably warmer to the touch than the others. But none got too hot to hold.

With a similar price and a lower test temperature than the Cable Matters enclosure, and better performance than the pricier OWC alternative, the Ugreen 40Gbps enclosure is our favorite USB4 SSD enclosure. But if you prefer a tool-free enclosure for frequently swapping out drives and don't mind a bit more heat, the Cable Matters enclosure is worth considering as well, especially if it's on sale.

Best Premium M.2 SSD Enclosure

The DockCase Visual Smart M.2 Enclosure offers a couple of really unique features and a very attractive, premium design. You’ll pay a bit more than you would for most other 10 Gbps SSD enclosures, but at $49 as of press time, it’s not crazy expensive.

The first thing you’ll notice about the DockCase Visual Smart M.2 is that it has a built-in 1.33-inch LCD screen, something we haven’t seen on any other brand of enclosure. The screen displays basic information about your SSD, including its capacity, partitions, free space, battery charge level and drive health information. You can toggle between different stats by short pressing a selection button on the chassis and you double press to rotate the screen.

There’s also a small, built-in battery that provides 5-10 seconds (depending on which model you get) of service time in the event of a power failure. That brief window of time might be enough to allow the drive to finish writing some data and avoid corrupting your drive in the event of an ill-timed unplugging.

The case is really swanky, with a gunmetal-gray aluminum alloy bottom and sides to go along with a tempered glass top (the location of the screen). Even the Philips head screws look a bit fancier than normal. Installation is pretty straightforward, as you just need to remove the bottom panel, which attaches with a single screw, connect the drive and then mount it with another Philips head screw. DockCase claims that its controller runs cooler than most other controllers, lowering the overall temperature, but we didn’t have a good way to verify this claim.

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In terms of performance, the DockCase Visual Smart M.2 Enclosure is about on par with its less-expensive, 10 Gbps brethren. When we ran separate DiskBench 25GB read and write tests, it returned rates of 701.9 and 535.9 MBps respectively, slightly lower than the Plugable NVMe enclosure (718.4 / 564.9 MBps) but in the same ballpark. On CrystalDiskMark, its sequential speeds of 1067.3 and 1043.1 MBps were nearly identical to those of Plugable’s enclosure and the SSK SHE-C325.

The screen clearly isn’t necessary, but it’s a nice-to-have feature. We found that seeing the amount of free space on the drive is pretty nice, but it’s a little weird that the drive needs to “boot” and “detect disk” for several seconds when you first plug it in (you can avoid this problem by setting it to fast boot mode, which doesn’t give you the stats). Also, the screen frequently displayed warnings telling us that the drive was transferring data even when all we did was have a File Explorer window open to it. We wish, though, that we could do something cooler with it, like adding a photo or animated GIF.

We can’t tell how helpful the power loss protection is and we didn’t have a good way to test it. For that reason, we definitely wouldn’t pay the extra $10 to get the longer, 10-second PLP, unless you’re doing something where data integrity is of the utmost importance. Above all else, DockCase’s enclosure has a very premium look and feel that might make it worth spending an extra $20 to $30 over most competitors.

Best 3.5-inch Hard Drive Enclosure

If you still have a 3.5-inch hard drive hanging around and want to turn it into an external storage device, you’ll need something like Ugreen’s CM472. This hard drive enclosure comes with an external power brick, so it needs to spin up a power-hungry desktop hard drive and, despite the bulk, is a bit smaller than competitors like the Orico HM35C3.

Installing a drive in the Ugreen requires no tools at all as you just slide the top of the plastic case off and plug your drive into the SATA port inside. There are no mounting brackets inside so, if you use a 2.5-inch drive instead, it will have a lot of space around it and could, in theory, shake loose and roll around in there. However, we tested with a 2.5-inch SSD and it stayed tightly connected to the SATA port. Also, you wouldn’t buy a 3.5-inch enclosure like this if you planned to use it with a 2.5-inch drive.

On our tests, the Ugreen CM472 performed well enough, with transfer rates that were in line with other 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch SATA enclosures. On CrystalDiskMark, with our SSD installed, the enclosure returned sequential read and write transfer rates of 456.7 and 453.3 MBps, which is actually a better read speed than we got with the Orico HM35C3 (449.4 / 457 MBps) and is on par with the 2.5-inch Sabrent EC-USASP (456.1 / 453.6 MBps).

Best Dual SSD Enclosure

If you plan to use more than one M.2 NVMe SSD, Orico’s BM2C3-2N makes it easy by putting two SSD enclosures into one chassis. An aluminum rectangle with a couple of thin drawers that slide in and out to let you load in the SSDs, the BM2C3-2N is unremarkable apart from its ability to hold multiple drives.

For better or worse, each drive is completely independent of the other, with its own USB-C port. In fact, Orico only includes one USB cable in the box so, if you want to plug in both drives at once, you’ll need to get another USB-C cable. To help with cooling, the Orico BM2C3-2N comes with two sets of thermal pads and heatsinks to place on top of your SSDs.

Performance-wise, the Orico BM2C3-2N dual SSD enclosure was equivalent to single 10 Gbps enclosures. On CrystalDiskMark, it got sequential read and write rates of 1066.7 and 1043 MBps respectively, which is very similar to the Plugable enclosure’s rates of 1067.2 and 1044.9 MBps.

Best Cheap M.2 SSD Enclosure

If you just want an inexpensive SSD enclosure that makes it fairly easy M.2 NVMe SSDs in and out, the SSK SHE-C325 is a great choice. The relatively slim enclosure slides open and closed, though it comes with a tiny Philips head screw (and screwdriver) to lock the pieces together for a more permanent placement.

On a few M.2 enclosures, including the SSK SHE-C325, we found that our test Kingston Rage Fury SSD’s built-in graphene heat spreader, which adds 3.5mm of z height to the drive, didn’t leave much vertical clearance. However, the SHE-C325 could close anyway, without scraping the drive’s surface. Considering that many M.2 SSDs have built-in, non-removable heat spreaders, every enclosure should accommodate them.

The SHE-C325 isn’t the most attractive enclosure on the market, but it does use mostly aluminum casing (the left part near the USB port is plastic) and at 4.5 x 1.5 x 0.4 inches, it’s pretty portable. SSK’s enclosure also comes with a thermal pad to help send heat to the aluminum casing, but you’ll only want to use it if your SSD doesn’t have a built-in heat spreader.

The SSD enclosure and its 10 Gbps USB-C port deliver performance that’s in line with more expensive competitors. When we used CrystalDiskMark on the SSK SHE-C325, it returned sequential read and write rates of 1066.9 and 1044.2 MBps, which is within a few kilobytes of the Plugable enclosure. On the DiskBench test, it read and wrote a 25GB folder at a solid 712 and 559.2 MBps.

Best Compact, Cheap M.2 SSD Enclosure

One of the smallest and least expensive M.2 SSD enclosures you can get, the Orico M2PV-C3, combines great value with strong performance and good looks, but the installation could be a lot easier. At 4.3 x 1.2 x 0.5 inches, the M2PV-C3 enclosure is even smaller and more pocket-friendly than the SSK SHE-C325, itself a rather small enclosure and, with a price of $18 (at press time), it is even cheaper.

The Orico’s M2PV-C3’s design is less polarizing than that of the SSK SHE-C325, but it actually uses cheaper materials, as the top panel is ridged aluminum but the sides and bottom are ABS plastic.

To install our drive in this enclosure, we first had to remove the aluminum panel, which is attached with a tiny, 5-point star screw rather than a normal Philips head type. The enclosure comes with a small star-shaped screwdriver, but we lost it and had to go digging through our iFixit kit to find an appropriate head.

Inside, the enclosure’s controller board has mounting holes for 2230, 2242, 2260 and 2280 SSDs, but there’s no pre-installed mounting screw to hold the right side of the SSD. The drive comes with tiny rubber pegs that you must stick in one of these holes, but to pop the peg in, we had to pull the controller board out of the case and force it in. Once that is done, you can attach the SSD, use the peg to hold its edge down and reseal the case. If you’re just using your enclosure for cloning, this would be a hassle to do multiple times, but you could always just leave the enclosure open in that case.

When we ran DiskBench with a 25GB folder and our test SSD, the M2PV-C3 read and wrote at rates of 711.7 and 538.1 MBps, which was within the range of other 10 Gbps enclosures. However, when we ran CrystalDiskMark, the sequential read speed of 687 MBps was significantly lower than those of other 10 Gbps enclosures such as the Plugable NVMe enclosure (1067.2 MBps). However, the sequential write speed of 1047 MBps was actually higher than the Plugable’s rate of 1044.9 MBps.

Other SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures We Tested

• OWC Express 1M2
  A premium enclosure from a well-known brand, the OWC Express 1M2 performed well with our Samsung drive and stayed cooler than the competition thanks to its aluminum shell. It just didn't stand out in terms of performance or price, despite costing more than most competing enclosures. It's a great option if you don't mind paying extra for aesthetics and the brand name.
  
• Cable Matters 40Gbps Portable USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 SSD Enclosure
  We like the tool-free design of this enclosure, which makes it better for those who plan to swap internal drives regularly. But the permanently attached cable turned us off – especially since it has a tendency to get caught in the small cutout when you close the enclosure door. And in our testing, this was one of the warmer-running enclosures, which could also have contributed to its slightly lower performance than some of the competition.
  
• ZikeDrive
  The fastest enclosure we've tested, the ZikeDrive uses an ASMedia ASM2464 controller to deliver USB 4 read speeds that are 20 percent faster than we've seen on the competition. Write speeds were less impressive, but still strong in most scenarios. However, the ZikeDrive doesn't make the best list yet, because it's part of an IndieGoGo campaign and not available for general sale.
  
• Plugable USB C to M.2 NVMe Tool-Free Enclosure
  This is one of the most performant 10 Gbps enclosures and one of the most convenient, thanks to a tool-free design that allows you to slip the cover off by pressing a spring-loaded switch. It's a few dollars more than the Sabrent EC-SNVE at present and we prefer that enclosure's flip-up lid to the Plugble's slide-out one.
  
• Sabrent ECOCUB
  This 2.5-inch SATA enclosure is a sibling of the EC-USASP and costs the same $11 at publication time. It offers similar performance and an attractive clear case that lets you see your drive and some bright status lights. However, popping it open without cracking the plastic was a bit of a challenge.
  
• Anker PowerExpand M.2 and SATA SSD Enclosure
  On paper, this M.2 SSD enclosure looks like a winner with an attractive, all-aluminum chassis that pops open with a spring-loaded switch. However, we have to advise against buying the PowerExpand as it had so little vertical clearance that it would not close on our SSD, got stuck and ended up ripping some of our sticker off. We then attempted to benchmark the enclosure with the cover off and it just stopped working after a few minutes.
  
• Orico M234C3-U4
  This USB 4 enclosure is $20 cheaper than the Orico M2V01-C4 that we picked for our best list and it offers similar performance. However, the M234C3-U4 has a fatal flaw: though it is supposed to be backwards compatible with USB 3.x ports, it would not work (failing to mount its drive at all) when we connected it to non USB 4 / Thunderbolt ports.
  
• Orico 25PW1-U3
  The cheapest unit we tested, this 2.5-inch SSD / hard drive enclosure was just $6 at press time. However, opening its flimsy plastic chassis was extremely difficult and we nearly cracked it in the process.
  
• Wavlink WL-ST235
  This cheap, 2.5-inch SSD / hard drive enclosure cost less than $10 at press time and provided reasonable performance in our tests, but the tool-free case was difficult to open.
  
• Orico HM35C3
  This 3.5-inch hard drive enclosure has a USB-C 10 Gbps port that allows it to have higher theoretical transfer rates that other enclosures this size, but since you’ll be using it with a spinning hard drive, it’s doubtful you’d see a real-world advantage. Physically, the drive is bigger, bulkier and a bit more expensive than the Ugreen hard drive enclosure that sits on our list of best picks.

How We Tested SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures

How We Tested SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures

To see how each SSD and hard drive enclosure performs, we installed an SSD, connected the enclosure to our testbed laptop (a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 10th Gen) and then ran a series of benchmark tests, using three different apps: PCMark 10’s Storage Benchmark, DiskBench and CrystalDiskMark 8. To maintain consistency, we used the same M.2 NVMe SSD, a Kingston Rage Fury PCIe 4.0 SSD (2TB), in all of our M.2 enclosures and the same 2.5-inch SATA SSD (a 1.9TB Toshiba model) in all of our 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA enclosures.

PCMark 10’s Storage Benchmark returns three numbers: an overall performance score (higher is better), the bandwidth speed (measured in MBps, higher is better) and access time (measured in ms, lower is better). With CrystalDiskBench, a synthetic test that provides transfer rates under different conditions, we used a 1GB file size and recorded both the sequential read and write speeds, which are theoretical maximums, and the 4K (queue depth 32) read and write speeds, which are the most similar to everyday file loading and saving.

Using DiskBench, we ran two file copy tests, using a 25GB folder full of files. On the first test, we measured write speed by copying the files from our laptop to the drive in the enclosure. Then we measured read speed by copying the same files back to the laptop.

For better or worse, we found that most enclosures with the same USB interface (ex: USB 10 Gbps) offered fairly similar throughput. So what matters more is that we took note of how easy it was to install the SSD into each enclosure, the build quality of the enclosure, what goodies came in the box (cables, screwdrivers) and what extra features each enclosure has.

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Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: M.2 SSD Enclosures

It’s no surprise that, on most tests, the two 40 Gbps enclosures, which cost up to $100 more than the 10 Gbps competitors and require a USB 4 or Thunderbolt port, outperform their competitors. However, the more more expensive enclosures actually had slower read speeds on DiskBench and, strangely, very low 4K Q32 write speeds on CrystalDiskMark.

Among the 10 Gbps enclosures which make up the majority of the market and are most affordable, the results were almost always within a few points or MBps of each other. The one exception is that the Orico M2PV-C3 returned a much lower CrystalDiskMark sequential read rate than all of the others.

Benchmark Results: 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures

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Among the SATA enclosures, the two models that have 10 Gbps USB ports stood out, but didn’t dominate all the tests. Note that a SATA drive only operates at up to 6 Gbps, so the 10 Gbps ports really act as 6 Gbps ports and are even labeled as such on the devices. Overall, the DockCase enclosure seemed to win on the most tests, though its 4K Q32 writes were below the rest of the pack.

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