80Gpbs Drive Enclosures

In Issue 011 of UNREDACTED Magazine, I devoted an article to the importance of drive specifications in regard to the disk speed which can be achieved. The purpose of the article was two-fold. I wanted to explain how important protocols were, such as Thunderbolt 3/4/5, USB 2/3.2 Gen 2/3.2 Gen 2x2/4, PCIe Gen 2/3/4/5, and SATA I/II/II, when we considered drives for our daily use, but I also wanted to be sure people were not wasting their money on the latest speed marketing if their devices did not support those promises. The focus of the article was on 40Gbps NVMe drive enclosures which were reliable delivering 3,000 MB/s in real-world use, which is quite impressive for an external drive. In that article, I briefly stated that the only way we could do better was with 80Gbps enclosures and ports which supported those speeds. The response was immediate. Readers wanted to know how to get more speed from large external drives. In that article, I found that the Qwiizlab 40Gbps USB4 enclosure (https://amzn.to/3OgrIub) performed better than more expensive competitors, so I went back to that company to test their 80Gbps option (https://amzn.to/3Nj3zD2). I inserted the same 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drive (https://amzn.to/4qwf7Ar) into the new enclosure and began my tests. The following displays the device next to a Mac Studio computer. I first tried it on my aging MacBook Pro M1 Pro which only has Thunderbolt 4 ports. As expected, I achieved results similar to the tests with the 40Gbps enclosure within the magazine. This is because port specifications matter. That computer simply does not have ports capable of taking advantage of an enclosure offering 80Gbps. For that computer, a less expensive enclosure and drive would work almost as well. However, this was a much different story when connected to a more modern computer. I found the fastest computer in the office, a Mac Studio with a M4 Max chip and Thunderbolt 5 ports. First, I tested the internal 2TB drive for reference: This was standard for the large drive and Max chip. This gives me blazing fast access to large chunks of data on the internal drive. Next, I tested the external 80Gbps enclosure: I was shocked. I was getting faster speeds from an external, non-apple, drive than the overpriced Apple drive soldered onto the motherboard. I was skeptical at first, but larger data speed test were just as fast. I pivoted to my real-world test. I copied a 250 GB database from the internal drive to the external: There were no pauses or signs of throttling. In less than a minute, I copied over this huge database which would have taken 30 minutes on a portable USB disk. The device did get warm, but never hot. There is no fan, so it is important to attach the included thermal pad to the drive as explained in the manual. The catch: price. Like any other technology, the latest advancements will cost more than the previous generation. I once paid $500 for a 1TB, dual 3.5" SATA disk array many years ago. It was slow but offered unbelievable storage at the time. I now pay less than $100 for a 1 TB microSD card which is tiny and faster. Expect to pay just under $200 for an 80Gbps enclosure while the 40Gbps options will be less than $70. I suspect we will see these prices eventually drop, but it may be a while before we see 120Gbps drives emerge. We will need faster NVMe options before than can be a possibility, but I am thrilled with 7,000 MB/s in real-word use. Who is this for? Only people who have the need for the speed. If you have a computer with ports capable of 80Gbps or higher, then you might be justified in this upgrade. Since I move huge databases around often, I am now hooked on this enclosure. I was able to offload a terabyte of data from my internal drive to the external in approximately two minutes. It seems too good to be true. I will repeat myself from the magazine article. My first hard drive was a 5400 RPM spinning disk which achieved 100 MB/s. The later 7200 RPM drives achieved 130 MB/s and the rich people who had SCSI drives were getting 150 MB/s. When I had an early SSD offering 480 MB/s , I was confident that was the end. I never imagined that we would get over 30x those speeds on solid-state medium back then. I often remind myself of this when I start looking at the latest gadgets. We are truly spoiled. Disclosures: I am not affiliated with any companies mentioned within this article. I was not paid or asked to write this article. I receive commissions through Amazon affiliate links, but not directly from any of these companies.