Mercury Elite Pro Mini USB C Bus-Powered External Storage

Just like everything else from OWC, this is extremely high quality and high performance. No surprises. Solid metal construction. Doesn't slow down after a while like other brands do. I love it!

I bought 3 of this to use with Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SATA SSDs on my Mac Studio. It shows its maximum speed performance as already known. Good design, best performance, and cheap. I would recommend this to Mac users surely.

After all was said and done this turned out to be a nice, little enclosure. It's small, well built, snappy and stays cool so far. Installing a Crucial 4TB MX500 drive wasn't what OWC's video made it out to be. Their video simply shows their drive connecting to the board easily. The Crucial on the other hand required disconnecting the board, plugging it into the drive then reconnecting the board to the enclosure. No big deal really, just expect it and have a small Torx or Allen wrench on hand. Knowing what to expect I'd purchase another.

To me, an enclosure with a good 2.5" SSD in it is the best storage compromise you can make. Generally more reliable than ready made external drives. Less heat issues compared to NVME enclosures. Still more portable compared to 3.5" drives. Faster than spinning rust, and relatively affordable. I plugged a TeamGroup Vulcan 1 TB drive into my OWC enclosure. It was super easy to install, just pushed into the SATA connection. A few screws to put the enclosure back together and I was finished. I've had no issues reading it on Linux and Win11. It's fast enough that I was able to install Battlefield 2042 on the drive and game on it while plugged in to the USB-C port on my laptop. My only regret is that I probably should have equipped it with a 2tb capacity or larger. It holds plenty of data as is, but for a gaming and multimedia drive, more is always better.

I had a SSD lying around and wanted to use it as portable storage (instead of a flash drive). I received this unit and I was very surprised at the quality. It's precision grade aluminum with logo on front. The wired connection sits firmly in place with no looseness (does not wiggle around). I tested the drive with usb-c, and it performed very well (568 MB/s using diskmark).

If you're shopping by price you could probably do better. That's fine. I've had good luck with OWC enclosures so I grabbed one of these for the MANY redundant backups I keep. Old spinning disc drives still have some value, maybe not as fast but in a worst-case scenario I don't care about speed. Used DriveDX to find a decent 2TB drive from the pile and put it in, no issues. It's all probably for naught but all it took was a single external drive enclosure somehow killing a HDD and itself so I stick with brands that haven't failed me. That event over a decade ago has driven home the importance of regular, redundant backups on trusted hardware. Never again. This is made of typical extruded aluminum body, basic construction and assembly, nothing special. Vented end looks pretty, comes with a decent cable. Not sure what the max speeds are but I'll post a screenshot of BlackMagic with Seagate Barracuda 2.5" 5400 RPM HDD. Your results may be higher with an SSD? This is plugged directly into the back of an M2 Mac Mini via TB cable. Long story short: I'll be plugging this in at regular intervals for backups, bus powered, probably not a speed demon but does the job.

Had Samsung SSD drives in both. What are the chances that both enclosures fail within a couple weeks? As always OWC warranty process is a joke, waste of time and the out of pocket cost enormous. Just simpler to go with a different brand.

Love this little enclosure. I had a couple of 2.5” SSDs that I wanted to use and this include fit the bill. Installed the drive and had in running on the computer in about 5mins. Being bus powered is another advantage in that I don’t have to worry about turning a separate item on and off.