UGREEN M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps NVMe External Enclosure, Aluminum Tool-free Hard Drive Enclosure Support UASP & TRIM, NVMe Pcie Adapter for M and M&B Key in 2230/2242/2260/2280 SSD

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Installing an SSD is pretty easy as you just need to unscrew the cover, attach the M.2 drive along with the optional cooling pad, screw in the mounting screw and reattach the cover. Unfortunately, both the cover and the mounting screw are 5-point star shaped screws, which are not very common. However, there’s a screwdriver in the box. Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Generally, the higher a drive's capacity, the cheaper it will be per gigabyte. But that's not always true; sometimes the very highest-capacity drives come at a per-gigabyte price premium. The basement for budget external SSDs is currently about 7 cents per gigabyte, mostly from second- or third-tier vendors. Calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives.

The type of NAND used matters. SLC (Single-Level Cell/1-bit) is fastest, MLC (Multi-Level Cell/2-bit) is next, TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) is slower, and QLC (Quad-Level Cell/4-bit) is slowest. However, the formula is complicated by the fact that you can treat any type of NAND (except SLC) as its faster predecessor by simply writing fewer bits. Vendors do this with portions of the SSD for use as cache, which means that a TLC or QLC drive can be just as fast as a SLC drive, until this cache is used up. Update 27 Feb 2023: It appears later versions of the SATA board also have this pogo pin to provide extra power, per this forum post. Investigating NVMe Storage Performance Anomaly

I also have a couple Orico drives with fans, but those are just overkill and mostly for show. They do work, just big and require tools to swap drives. As a replacement for the SATA bus, it was decided to leverage a much higher-bandwidth bus technology that was also already in place—PCI Express, or PCIe. PCIe is the underlying data transport layer for graphics and other add-in cards.. As of generation 3.x, it offers multiple lanes (up to 16 for use with any one device in most PCs) that handle darn near 1GBps each (985MBps).

So it appears that whilst the hardware may be capable of UASP, the current configuration or firmware for the device isn’t configured to have it enabled. As far as I know, there isn’t a way to force enable UASP if the device doesn’t have it enabled. Arguably more important than the type of storage mechanism inside an external SSD is how it connects to your PC or Mac. Almost all external SSDs today plug into either some flavor of USB port, or a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port.As you can see, some USB specs are tied to certain system-side physical USB connectors. We'll get into that in a moment.