By PURPLELEC | 26 March 2025 | 0 Comments
External SSD enclosure controller and high-speed enclosure analysis
In the realm of external SSD enclosures, the choice of controller chips significantly impacts performance. Four major suppliers dominate the market: ASMedia, Intel, JMicron, and RealTek. Among them, Realtek and JMicron stand out by offering the only widely - used single - chip solutions that are compatible with both SATA and NVMe SSDs. These solutions are commonly found in enclosures priced between \(20 and \)50, such as the Uni model I've reviewed. However, they are limited by the speeds of USB 3.x. Other suppliers' offerings support either SATA or NVMe SSDs, but not both.
If you're aiming for the absolute fastest enclosures in 2025, there are two options for use with NVMe SSDs: USB4 or Thunderbolt 3.
USB4 ASM2464PD SSD Enclosures
Compared to older Thunderbolt 3 designs that reserve bandwidth for DisplayPort and traditional USB, these enclosures can maintain higher throughput. When paired with the latest Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs, the actual peak throughput reaches approximately 3.1 - 3.8GB/s. Since 2020, many enclosures have claimed to be "USB4 - compatible," but if they are based on older Thunderbolt 3 chips, users need to pay attention to the fine print. Enclosures based on the ASM2464PD chipset typically exceed 3.2GB/s and should not have been on the market before July 2023. Some brands conducted crowdfunding campaigns earlier. In 2023, few PCs were capable of fully leveraging these speeds. AMD CPU - based systems with built - in USB4 running the latest version of Windows 11 seem to yield the best results. Most of these enclosures use a similar PCB design and have nearly identical performance characteristics. However, some come with old firmware, which may affect performance in certain cases. Refer to the firmware section below to check if there are available updates for your enclosure.
Thunderbolt 3 JHL7440 Enclosures
The majority of Thunderbolt 3 enclosures are based on the older DSL6xxx/JHL6xxx chips (Alpine Ridge). Due to the way the controller reserves bandwidth for DisplayPort and USB traffic, the available speed is limited to 22Gb/s out of 40Gb/s. However, the JHL7440 (Titan Ridge) solution can provide approximately 10% higher transfer speeds, with actual speeds reaching up to about 2.6 - 2.8GB/s. Many models of this type are labeled as USB4 or Thunderbolt 4, but in reality, they are just Thunderbolt 3.
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