Aluminum 10Gbps USB C Hard Drive Enclosure for 2.5" SSD/HDD

I've bought two of these type C enclosures and I must say, they're such a great deal that I couldn't believe there wasn't any reviews. These are my new go to enclosures that I'll be recommending to anyone needing a good, solid, stable 2.5" enclosure. I made them tool-less with thumbscrews, see photos. The thumbscrew legs are M3x6mm thumbscrews and look fantastic. The clear rubber pads were in a variety pack of assorted "bumpers" that I picked up at Walmart. Any thin silicone/rubber non-slip pads should work and these were pre-cut. The pads fit almost perfectly but I'd like to have some that are a little thinner, these are about 1.5mm thick. These drives are used around the house as DVR/PVR drives so they're not transported too much. Because of that I don't use any screws inside, they're really not needed and the thumbscrews made drive swaps a breeze. These thumbscrews also fit the MiniPro, Vantec GX and Tripp Lite type C enclosures. I noticed the price went up by $4. Edit 10/25/2018: I've now bought three and am using this last one with a 240GB OCZ 460 SSD. It's getting 445 MBs, reading from a HDD and writing to the enclosure. Read speed is just as good. It's maxing out a USB 3.0 5 Gbps port. More on this below. I have two Cable Matters USB 3.1 Gen 2 type C enclosures, a MiniPro Type C, and a MiniPro USB 3.1/eSATA combination. There are several aluminum enclosures available which are very similar in design on the inside, but have a little different outer housing. Compare the Cable Matters enclosure to the MiniPro Type C and you'll see what I mean. This one is the better design. The Cable Matters enclosure doesn't plug the hole in the drive rack so it gets much better air flow, where the MiniPro outer casing curves up to cover the air flow hole. The Cable Matters enclosure stays cooler, no doubt about it. I tested it with a SATA III WD Black 7200 RPM drive (requires 0.58 amps, more on this later). Look at illustration 2 in picture 6 of this listing and you'll see the large hole in the drive deck that I'm referring to. There is a space below the drive rack, visible from the front and back, and it gets great air flow through there. I say this is the best package deal because it not only comes with the USB 3.1 Type C cable, but also a Type A cable for older ports, and it also includes the USB power cable. No other USB C enclosure includes the power cable and many don't have the external power port at all. Many other enclosures only supply one interface cable, too, either Type A or C, but not both. With a AC to DC adapter at 5 volts, 2 amps (3.5mm tip), you have a complete drive kit that'll power the most power hungry drives you can find, drives that other enclosures choke on. Speaking of power, people plug their drives into USB 2 ports because their USB 3 ports have problems. Assuming your cables, hardware and drivers are ok, you're likely having power issues, especially if you're using a hub. A USB 2 port only supplies 500 milliamps or .5 amp (1/2 amp), and many drives require more power than that. A USB 3.0 port supplies 900 milliamps or .9 amps, and a USB 3.1 port provides 1.5 amps. Many times too little power is the problem from the start and switching to a lower power USB 2 port doesn't help at all. Don't use your USB 2 ports for your power cable, they're too low power to be of any use. My WD drive is .58 amps. Of course, I'm taking about if you're having problems, first try to make sure the drive is getting plenty of power. If you have a USB wall charger, that'll work great. Make sure it's one amp or more. Power problems also arises when you use a USB 3 hub. They also require power to function, then you plug in a keyboard and mouse etc, and you use up a lot of the 900 milliamps before you ever plug your drive in. I highly recommend a powered USB 3 hub if you're going to be using external USB 3.0 or 3.1 enclosures, or really any USB enclosures. It'll alleviate many of the problems people complain about in reviews. This isn't so much of a problem if you're aware of the power requirements of your particular hard drive, and you take steps to make sure the drive gets plenty of power. Some problems I've seen from low power issues is an error that says the drive is write protected, or it writes very slow at around 1-2 MBs etc, and frequent disconnects and just plain acting flaky. I hope these tips will make your life a little easier, at least as far as getting along with USB hard drives goes. If you read some reviews, you'll be able to spot the people with power issues very quickly. Oh, speed. Of course everyone is interested in speed. These are fast little enclosures and your drives will run cool. I copied 330 GBs to one and it felt very slightly warm, but not anywhere near hot. It had been powered on a couple of hours to reach running temperature, then the transfer was done. Speed is hard to measure with caching etc, but they'll do over 100 MBs, even with SATA II drives. Again, caching makes it hard to tell exactly, but I was getting over 450 MB/s using a 240GB OCZ Vertex 460 SSD (Not the newer 460A model, but older plain 460 which is a faster MLC SSD). I was using a 5 Gbps USB 3.0 port and SATA III speed is 6Gbps, so it's bottle necked just a little if you're not using a USB 3.1port at 10 Gbps. The packaging is good with individual items sealed in plastic and the enclosure is well protected. Overall this is the best 2.5" aluminum hard drive enclosure packaged deal on the internet (that I can find). It comes with a complete set of cables and it's a very good looking enclosure. The photos don't do it justice if you ask me. It also includes a nice small screwdriver, so now I have a screwdriver in my drive carrying cases. I like carrying cases with plenty of room for all of the accessories. There is nothing like not being able to do the job when you arrive. I think you'll be very happy as long as you're aware of power requirements etc. You'll be copying and moving files in no time. This is a 5 star deal all day! Oh, one more thing, cost. I did a lot of research because I needed more external or USB C enclosures. I originally bought a Minipro USB 3.1/eSATA model for the eSATA, and it's just too expensive to buy a lot of those. All of the other Type C enclosures I mentioned cost from $10 (ten) to $18 (eighteen) MORE, at $29, $30, and $38 for the Tripp Lite. The MiniPro is $29 and the Vantec is $30 and none come with as many cables . USB C is the fastest if it's plugged into a 10 Gbps USB 3.1 port but these are plenty fast on a USB 3.0 port, too. At 10 Gbps, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is even faster than eSATA but I can't comment more on that because I only have 3.0. I'll be getting a couple of more of these pretty soon and they'll be right at home when I upgrade my motherboard. You can also install an add in 4x PCIe card if you absolutely must have 10 Gbps USB 3.1, but I'm using my last PCIe slot for a NVMe SSD. I'm also running Linux but tested in Windows 7 too. Good luck.

Actually decent speed replaced my old crap enclosure and impressed me

I bought this enclosure to use with a Crucial BX200 2.5 inch ssd and an old 2.5 inch Seagate hard drive, and the enclosure works as advertised. The enclosure is very easy to open and slot a drive into, and I have switched out multiple drives with this and all have worked. I have downloaded large files onto the Crucial ssd with no issues at a very reasonable speed. Now, I have not speed-tested this enclosure, so refer to other reviewers on that regard, but I do not believe my 2.5 inch SATA ssd can even surpass the advertised speed, so I do not believe I can even fully test this enclosure's speeds. I have also used this with a 500gb Seagate hard drive, which works great (for a hard drive, at least), and I have used this with another old hard drive as well. Included with the enclosure is a USB C to A cable and a C to C cable, both of which I have used and work well. The one complaint I have is the build quality. While the aluminum top is nice and works well for heat dissipation, the bottom plastic section has a very weak clip, and does not stay on extremely well. It stays, but a nicer clip, or a latch of some sort would be a much more elegant and functional solution. Also, most modern thin 2.5 inch drives will flop around in the enclosure if it is moved because of all the extra space in the enclosure. A very small insert is provided to aid in this regard, but once again, it is not a very elegant or practical solution and a better solution should have been provided. All things considered, these are very minor concerns, as the enclosure does its job where it counts, and has worked well in my testing. Now honestly any new ssd buyers should probably just opt for an affordable nvme ssd instead of a 2.5 inch drive as prices for nvme drives have been dropping rapidly in the past year, but for those who opt for a 2.5 inch drive, or in my case, have older 2.5 inch drives, it works excellently.

***Update*** The enclosure ships with two (2) cables. An USB-C to C cable and an USB 3 to C cable. At this price, you should expect that they will fail after flexing them a few times. A more durable cable costs more than the enclosure itself. The USB C to C cable was so bad that right out of the box, it wasn't sending enough juice to the enclosure. The status LED did not light up and the drive did not mount reliably unless I unpluged/re-plugged several times. After changing out the cable to a known good cable, the drive mounted reliably and the LED status light is on. If you own a computer with a USB-C port, the power cord that came with your computer may be data capable. ***Original Review*** The CableMatters 2.5" enclosure is a great value for a USB 3.1 gen 2 enclosure. At this price point, I'm guessing that most users are only looking to utilize an extra 2.5" drive sitting in the parts bin; a USB-C connection is all we need. Installation was super easy. Just open, slide in the drive, close, plug-in. I had an old Macbook converted into an iMovie editing station with a SSD as its internal drive. I put the old spinning HDD back in it when I recycled it with Apple. So I ended up with a Crucial 1T 6G SSD that needed a new home. Attached is a screenshot of its performance under a 1GB load. According to USB testing blogs, this is comparable to a similarly configured ready-built drive from a big-name Korean manufacturer.

Cable matters is always quality. No surprise here

Three computers, five cables, three SSDs (Mushkin, Crucial MX 500, Samsung 840) - one result: 41MBps. Digging into this a little, that's pretty much the speed cap for USB 2.0 I'm rather bummed that I bought two of these only to find that they don't work at even 3.0 speeds, let along 3.1. Testing on various different cables and computers didn't change anything - the specifications/Amazon description are simply wrong. Now, these are tool-less, well-made, easy to put together and take apart, and come with both USB C-C and USB A-C cables. There's really a lot of good features here. Just don't expect high speeds. I'd submit that these are perfect for most laptop/2.5" hard drives, but a bad fit for SSDs. UPDATE: Case is fine, I was the problem here. Apparently, every single test I ran was either the PC, the Port, or the Cable. Just performed a file copy with (the included) 6in C-To-C cable on another PC and got 350MBps. So I guess the lesson here is to be very careful which cable/interface you're using if you want USB 3.2 speeds. I'll conintue checking to try and find what was wrong with the known-good cables I was previously testing with...

My very first use of the item, I gently slid it half an inch to the side during a transfer which led to the device losing connection. The USB-C was still plugged in to the enclosure, but a slight tilt to the side causes total loss of connection for the cable. It is not worth using an enclosure that can cost you data loss and drive damage so easily. I also find that it's far to easy to open the enclosure. I'd later picked up the enclosure and somehow the lid slid off in the process. It doesn't take much pressure at all to remove the cheap, plastic, tool-less, back plate. Not a secure device by any means.

I'm currently using the two I bought for the two 4TB SSDs I have my movies on until the new 8TB 2.5" SSDs come out (who knows when that will happen). These are working perfectly for my needs (see added comment below). Once I retire them for this purpose, they will be handy for using as external backup drives. Installing and removing drives is very easy. So they do not eat up as much desktop space, I made an aluminum bracket to mount both of them vertically. Cable Matters should consider making at least a similar mounting bracket for mounting one of them. Edit 1: I bought two more of these to make a total of six that I have. These last two, however, were not exactly the same as the other four. They are slightly thinner than the first four I bought, making them a sloppy fit in the bracket I made for them, and the bottom cover fit far too snugly. I had to pry the covers off the first time I opened them up, then file and sand them to loosen them up enough to make them usable (they are still tighter than the first four enclosures I have). The excessively tight fit of the covers cost another star from the review. Cable Matters needs to tighten up their tolerances considerably! Edit 2: I bought these because Cable Matters claimed that they were TRIM compatible in Linux. They are but not in Linux Mint out of the box. Sadly, Cable Matters was not able to tell me how to get them to work (hence the low rating). After days of research (and some dumb luck), I finally figured out how to get them to TRIM in Linux Mint. These are the steps needed to get this enclosure to work in Linux: Create a udev rule in the terminal by pasting in the following command and hitting ENTER: sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/50-usb-ssd-trim.rules Type in your password, then hit ENTER. Paste this rule into the text editor (all one line): ACTION=="add|change", ATTRS{idVendor}=="174c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="235c", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_disk", ATTR{provisioning_mode}="unmap" Pressing CTRL+O, ENTER, and CTRL+X will save and close the file in Nano. Now, the next time you plug in your device, TRIM should work. Edit 3: I bought two more of these and they appear to be the earlier version in that the case is a darker gray and they have the power port that was supposed to have been discontinued. Either Cable Matters and/or Amazon dredged up some older ones from somewhere or Cable Matters decided to include the power port again (I doubt the latter). These still work fine and support TRIM but Cable Matters' lack of consistency is disappointing. Edit 4: The last two I bought were actually an older model with a different part number. My bad. I've since used these to format eight Samsung 8TB SSDs and populate seven of them (one is a spare) without any trouble.

it is acceptable. but not recommended for lasting/ heavy usage.

I really like this enclosure. It fits my ssd quite nicely and seems to be of very decent quality. The top case is aluminum and matches the space grey Macs quite well. Throughput speeds are as good as can be expected for a sata ssd. The stock cable that comes with it is sufficient in getting those speeds. Those of you with an M1 Macbook Air should know that using the usb c charging cable that came with you Mac will hurt performance even though the Apple cable looks to be of higher quality. Definitely a nice addition to carry with you for added space on the go. If you want faster, opt for an M.2 NVME version to really hit those top numbers. I’m happy with my purchase and would buy it again.

Very good product works well, excellent quality

Seems sturdy and well built, works perfectly. Got this aluminum one to match my laptop so I don't care, but the SSD is not actually in contact with the aluminum, only with the plastic on the front and bottom so the fact that it is aluminum won't really help with heat dissipation if you're looking for that, but the vent at the back should do enough. One thing that did annoy me at first was the that the SSD in the case was not secured by anything other then the plug, and would flop up and down within the enclosure, hitting the top and bottom when moved. However upon going through the box again, hidden under the plastic liner thing is a small foam square to put in between the SSD and the slide-on cover, and now it doesn't move at all. That foam should probably be stuck in there from the start but at least it's in the box. Great!

Attached it to a thunderbolt port using included USB-C to USB-C cable. Fast and works well.