Today I'm taking a look at the WAVLINK UTE02. This is a Thunderbolt 3
enclosure for NVMe SSDs. You buy the enclosure, install your own M.2 SSD and,
in theory, you get super-fast external storage in a small portable form factor.
I tend to use external SSDs a lot - USB-C types - and I find their speed to be
perfectly fine. But just recently I ran out of space, again, and just as I was
about to hit the Buy Now button on a 1TB Samsung T5, I thought actually...
maybe I should check and see what other solutions are available. A Thunderbolt 3
Drive would be a good solution because Thunderbolt 3 offers four times the
bandwidth of USB 3.1. It's got a theoretical limit of 40 gigabits per
second, or 5 gigabytes per second, and that's more than enough to accommodate
the fastest NVMe SSDs. Now in real-world performance you're not going to get
those kind of speeds because of the various overheads involved, but there
should be enough bandwidth to run a fast NVMe SSD. Something like the Samsung 970 EVO
for example. Now this is a fast SSD, with a claimed 2,500 megabytes per
second write performance and a massive 3,400 megabytes per second read
performance. So, I'm going to put this 1TB SSD into the WAVLINK UTE02
enclosure and test it out. First of all, let's take a closer look at the
WAVLINK. In the box you get: the case, which comes in two halves; the
circuit board; a heatsink; a small Thunderbolt 3 cable with a screw-in clip;
and a nice bag to keep it in. They also supply this lovely little tool,
which unscrews to reveal a small flat-head and cross-head screwdriver combo.
So, if you keep this tool in the bag with the drive, then you'll always be able to
open it. Installing the SSD is as simple as slotting it into the socket and
screwing it into position. You then snap on the heatsink using these three
plastic clips. I did wonder if these would be removable, so I tried to remove
them, and you can do that. It's a little bit fiddly, but if you need to swap out
the SSD, you will be able to. Now the case is held together by three screws on each
side. These are very small screws and they're fiddly to put in. Again, I'd imagine it
would be very easy to lose them. The four screws that are at the end screw
nice and tightly into the metal case, but the two in the middle are screwed into a
plastic tab and, in my case, one of them couldn't be done up tightly. So, I'm
expecting that it will fall out at some point and I'll lose it. The screws
really take the shine off of what is otherwise a fairly good build quality.
I paid a hundred and eight pounds for this, so it's not a cheap piece of kit for
what it is. The description on the website described it as being
finished in leather which sounded really nice, but this is definitely not leather!
It's like a textured plastic, which frankly feels a little bit cheap,
although it does seem sturdy enough. I'm not so sure about this screw-in clip on
the cable. It is removable, but I don't know why you would want it. Again, it's another
thing that's really fiddly to do.
Once you've got the cable on it makes it a
bit awkward for putting in the bag, because you slide the drive into the bag
and what do you do with the cable? The socket isn't a loose fit or anything, so I might
just remove the clip and not use it. Now, the Samsung 970 EVO needs no
introduction. These are the de-facto standard for fast, high-quality SSDs.
It may well be wasted in this enclosure - I doubt we're ever going to get that top
performance, but I looked at buying a lesser quality drive and you don't save
a lot of money. So, in the end I just opted for this one, which cost £169.
So that means the total cost of this drive ends up at being £277.
That's pretty much double what you would pay for a 1TB Samsung T5 USB-C
SSD, so this certainly isn't a cheap acquisition. But is it worth the extra
money? Well, I'm going to speed test the drive on this MacBook Pro 13 using the
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. And just to get a reference, I'm actually going to
test the Samsung T5 first. We'll do a 5GB stress test and we'll take the
average of three runs. So we're getting about 477 megabytes per second on write,
and around 517 megabytes per second on read - I'll put the exact figures up
on the screen - and that's really acceptable performance. I use these kinds
of drives all the time for editing video and I edit straight off the drives. I've
never had any issues with it. OK, so now we're ready to test the Samsung 970 EVO
drive in the WAVLINK external enclosure. I need to confess at this
point we tried plugging this thing into the MacBook and it just wasn't getting
recognised at all. In the end we took everything apart and put it all back
together again. It turns out that in the course of doing some of our B-roll I'd
dropped this enclosure onto the table from a height of about maybe 2 inches
and that was enough to unseat the NVMe SSD inside the enclosure and stop it
from working. So this time I've tightened the screw up a little bit more. It might
have been my fault - I might not have tightened the screw enough, or it may just
be that it's an issue with the enclosure. If that is the case, it's not
going to last very long in my bag! But for now, let's assume that it was my
mistake and we'll carry on and do our test.
So, let's again run the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and we'll see how we get on.
So, the same capacity, the same portability, but five times the
performance! Is that worth twice the price of a T5? I guess it depends on what
you're doing, but I'm fairly pleased with the value. So this is a fast solution, but
how does it compare to the standard SSD in this MacBook Pro?
So, performance is broadly similar.
We also tested the SSD in our 2019 i9 iMac 27-inch.
You can see there's a fairly negligible difference across all the drives, though
I did note that there's more variation in the performance of the external drive
as compared to the internal drives, as sometimes I saw speeds drop below 1,000
megabytes per second. But that's really just the nature of the way we're
connecting the SSD and it's not a problem with the Samsung 970 EVO itself.
Now I also thought it would be nice to use this drive with my 2013 Mac Pro.
Whilst the Mac Pro does have Thunderbolt, it's the slower version - which also has
a different connector type. But no matter, I've got the Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2
adapter, so I connected it up along with a Thunderbolt 2 cable and this is what I got...
Yeah... nothing at all. I also tried this
star tech adapter and it was exactly the same thing. It turns out I was having
a bit of a brain fart! Neither of these adapters pass power
through, and the SSD drive is not self-powered. So, of course it needs some power
on the Thunderbolt connection. So unless some clever person has come up with an
adapter solution that can supply power, I won't be using this drive with the 2013
Mac Pro, and that is a bit of a disappointment. Well, I hope you found
this video useful. If you're not already subscribed to the channel, please
consider clicking the button, and I'll see you next time for some more geekery.