Today I'm going to be doing a review of the Orico USB to M.2 NVMe enclosure as well as their J10 512GB NVMe SSD. I'm going to be taking a look at these components separately as well as together as a combo and going to be taking a look at the thermals, performance and other characteristics of these two components. Orico sent me these drives for the purpose of this review and no money has changed hands. They haven't seen this review before it's gone public on YouTube but they have provided a link to take a look at this combo in the video description below. Let's first take a look at the M.2 SSD enclosure. This is a little USB enclosure that converts a USB-C signal into a small drive enclosure which holds a M.2 NVMe SSD up to a size of 2280. It's in-house in a clear plastic shell which is kind of convenient because it has a blue LED that blinks when there is drive activity and shows solid blue when it's on and running. As well as this enclosure in the box it includes two USB-C cables, a C-C and a C-A cable so you can plug it into almost any type of system as well as a thermal pad to have a better thermal connection between the black heatsink on the outside of this case and the SSD itself. Opening up the enclosure is simple by just sliding it back and I can take a look at the insides of it. There's two boards inside here, the M.2 SSD itself as well as the converter board. The converter board has one main chip on it, a Realtek RTL921D chip and this chip is in charge of converting the USB 10 gigabit signal that goes to the computer to a PCI Express connection that can be used with these NVMe drives. One aspect of this drive that I think could be improved is how the SSD mounts to it. I wish there was a tool-less mechanism because the current way of using this little screw and bushing can be a little bit annoying but I have gotten used to it and can do it quite quickly now after replacing the drive a few times. Taking out this little screw allows me to remove the M.2 drive and now I can see the converter board itself and the separate drive. One great thing with this converter board is it works with essentially any NVMe SSD I've tried it with. I can just plug the SSD I want into this enclosure, screw it down and it works with any third-party SSD I'd like. The other nice thing is it doesn't have any extra data or anything so this drive shows the exact same data if it was plugged into an internal NVMe slot on your board versus plugged into this converter board which can make it a great way of doing cloning or other data manipulation from like a perhaps dead laptop or something like that. Now let's take a look at the Orico J10 NVMe M.2 SSD. This is a relatively low-end SSD in the product stacks of drives. It's a PCI Express Gen 3 x 4 SSD, it's in the 2280 form factor and it's single-sided so there's no chips on the back of the drive. Removing the sticker on the drive shows what's hiding under the hood. The Realtek RTS5765DL controller. The other interesting thing this SSD has is a little red LED that blinks as well that shows disk activity which along with the enclosure means those two little LEDs that blink whenever there's disk activity. Looking at the NAND chips themselves on this drive, I can't find any specific information about the model of these chips, the manufacturer or anything else. Now let's take a look at the thermal performance of the J10 SSD and the enclosure. The J10 SSD comes with its own NVMe M.2 heatsink that can be attached to it. It can't be used inside the enclosure and only works when on a separate motherboard. But being a fairly low-end SSD, the heatsink really isn't needed as it doesn't pull that much power. I didn't see the temperatures ever get to an unacceptable range when used on an open air test bench with very little airflow. But one thing I do want to note is it seems like the temperature sensor has an issue on this SSD as it always reported 40C in all of my testing across multiple different systems and OSs. That seems like a bug. Putting it inside the enclosure got some relatively warm temperatures. Using a thermal camera I saw temperatures of roughly 47C on the external heatsink in this enclosure, but didn't see any noticeable thermal throttling or issues. It was very warm to the touch but not hot I'd say. I also saw some hot spots on the bottom of the enclosure, likely where the little controller that converts USB to NVMe signals was located. Putting in a higher power SSD in this enclosure, in this case an SN850X raised the temperatures a bit more. I got external temperatures of roughly 57C and temperatures on the drive of about 80C, which is quite hot for these drives. They should be able to thermal throttle down in case they get too hot, but I didn't see any performance drops due to thermal throttling in this case, but it is pretty hot for my liking. I would have loved to see a slightly larger heatsink to deal with in case I want to put a higher powered drive in and do a long write for example. Let's take a look at the performance of the enclosure and the SSD now. The enclosure has a USB 10Gbit port on it which gives you a bit over 1GB per second peak speeds when copying files around. It does actually need a USB 10Gbit port which is relatively common on computers from the last few years, but if you have an older computer with a 5Gbit USB port or accidentally used a wrong USB port on a system because it can be quite hard to find the speeds of the specific port, speeds will be limited. In terms of random performance on this enclosure, it seems to pretty much hit the limits of USB. I have some other higher performance USB devices I've used around and the random IO performance of this drive and those other drives seems to be comparable and likely is due to a USB limitation and not this enclosure being slow. I've also tried it with faster internal drives and the random IO performance doesn't improve significantly leading me to believe it is a USB limitation. While this is far from the fastest random performance you're going to see, it is still quite good and I'd say more than enough for something like a moderate amount of random IO over USB, so something like a Windows to Go boot drive or working with a few random files on the drive around. Running VMs on the drive even worked just fine. Taking a look at the performance of the J10 SSD, this drive is advertised of having a peak speed of 3.5GB per second read and 2.8GB per second write on no website. Using Crystal Disk Mark on a freshly formatted drive though, I couldn't hit that. I got 2.8GB per second read and 1.3GB per second write. Also on a freshly formatted drive on a 5950X system plugged directly into the onboard M.2 NVMe drives. I also tried my Z690 system with similar performance. So it seems like this drive can't hit the rated speeds. It could be that those rated speeds are for the larger 2TB capacities as smaller drives are typically slower, but I didn't see a table that shows different speeds for different capacities of this drive or perhaps I missed it, so it is disappointing that either the speeds aren't advertised very well for the different capacities or that the drive just can't hit its rated speeds. Taking a look at other aspects of performance, random IO on this drive is relatively slow as you would expect from an entry level DRAM-less SSD. It is fairly comparable to a higher end SATA SSD from a few years ago, and I'll say for general tasks like running a Windows desktop on it, it's perfectly fine. So I think for a lot of basic computing tasks, the random IO performance is fine, though it is quite a bit slower than higher end drives which will feel a bit more snappy especially on faster systems and especially when you're pushing them hard with many different applications and workloads running at the same time. The one thing that was a bit disappointing to me, especially in a USB use case where you might be copying large amounts of files to the drive is the sustained write performance. Almost all SSDs these days will have their write speeds drop after a period of time to a lower speed and use an internal kind of buffer to write quickly for a little bit and then slow down. And you can look at graphs like these and see how the drive starts fairly quickly and then it drops down after a period of time. And this drive starts writing at about that 1.3 GB per second range and then over the whole speed of the drive averages roughly 90 to 75 MB per second over the whole speed which is quite slow. And if you're doing something like backing up a system or copying an SD card full of photos or videos, this can take quite a while as it has a very substantial speed drop off. I did take a look at the size of that cache and if this drive is fully empty and has just been trimmed it's a bit over 100 GB but if it's a completely full drive or you aren't using trim on your system, it's roughly 10 GB as it's adaptive depending on how much free space the drive has. It would be nice to see an option of this enclosure that's comboed with a higher end drive because I think a use case of writing a lot of data to an external USB drive, at least for me, is fairly common if I'm doing like an imaging system or need to dump a lot of camera files or perhaps a backup of a system on one of these drives. And this drive is quite slow for doing that unfortunately. Otherwise it worked fine, I didn't have any data integrity issues or crashes or problems with the drive. Overall I found this enclosure to be quite a handy little drive to have laying around. It's small, convenient form factor to put in a pocket or backpack, carry lots of data and access at a fairly high rate. And as someone who works with a lot of different M.2 drives, being able to easily slot them in and access the data makes it quite convenient for imaging, backup, so using random M.2 drives that are laying around. I would love to see a slightly bigger heatsink as it does get quite hot with higher end drives especially and perhaps a heatsink on the back for the USB controller as well. As far as the J10 SSD goes, I think it's disappointing that it couldn't hit it's rated read and write speed numbers. And I think it's also disappointing seeing those sustained write speeds being relatively low. At least for my workloads I think it limits it's usability if I want to do like an image of a laptop or a large file dump onto this drive. If you're doing mostly reads in a USB enclosure, it works perfectly fine. And even though it doesn't have the fastest random i performance, it's going to be limited by the USB port anyways instead of the drive inside of it under most workloads. I think this combo works pretty good as an external drive and I think it's a huge step up over the mechanical hard drives we had a few years ago. And I'm overall glad this is a combo instead of a single drive because it's super handy to be able to take it apart and put in a different drive later on or maybe use this drive as an internal drive inside your system. Let me know what your thoughts on both of these products are in the comments below and thanks for watching this video.
