**USB4 External Drive Enclosure Review: A Game-Changer for Mac Users**

As a user who frequently works with external drives, I was excited to get my hands on the Oraco USB4 External Drive Enclosure. This enclosure promises to deliver fast speeds and backwards compatibility with both Thunderbolt 3 and USB devices, making it an attractive option for Mac users who want to take advantage of the latest connectivity technology.

The enclosure's build quality is one of its standout features. I was impressed by the sleek design and premium feel of the device, which looks like a high-end external drive that should fit in perfectly with any workstation or home office setup. The enclosure is also relatively compact, making it easy to store in a drawer or on a shelf.

One of the key benefits of the Oraco USB4 External Drive Enclosure is its backwards compatibility with both Thunderbolt 3 and USB devices. This means that users can connect the device to either a Mac with a Thunderbolt port or a PC with a USB port, without needing to worry about compatibility issues. The enclosure also supports USB-C and DisplayPort connections, making it a versatile option for users who need to connect multiple devices at once.

In terms of performance, I was impressed by the speeds delivered by the Oraco enclosure. Using Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test on my M1 Mac Mini, I saw peak read and write speeds of 2729 MB/s and 350 MB/s respectively, which is incredibly fast for an external drive. These speeds are even faster than those achieved with Thunderbolt 3 connections, making the Oraco enclosure a significant upgrade over standard USB drives.

I also tested the Oraco enclosure on my M1 Max machine, where I saw significantly faster write speeds of 2135 MB/s compared to the original M1 model. The read performance was still very good, with peak speeds of 2729 MB/s, although slightly slower than those achieved by Thunderbolt 3 connections.

The key factor behind these fast performance figures is the use of USB4 technology, which offers faster speeds and lower latency than standard USB interfaces. The Oraco enclosure takes full advantage of this technology, allowing users to take advantage of the latest connectivity standards without needing to switch to a PC or Mac with Thunderbolt 3 ports.

One question that arose during my testing was how the Oraco enclosure would perform over USB 3 connections. Using my Razer Blade Notebook, which has Thunderbolt 4 ports but also supports USB 3, I saw peak read and write speeds of 2420 MB/s and 1953 MB/s respectively. While these speeds are slower than those achieved with Thunderbolt 3 or USB4 connections, they're still very respectable for a USB 3 device.

Finally, I wanted to test the Oraco enclosure in a real-world scenario using a dock. In this case, I used the Razer Thunderbolt 4 Dock with my M1 Max machine and saw peak read and write speeds of 1608 MB/s and 27.46 MB/s respectively. While the read performance was unaffected by the use of the dock, the write performance was slightly slower than when connected directly to the Mac.

**Conclusion**

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with the Oraco USB4 External Drive Enclosure. Its fast speeds, backwards compatibility, and premium build quality make it an attractive option for Mac users who want to take advantage of the latest connectivity technology without having to switch to a PC or Mac with Thunderbolt 3 ports. While there may be some trade-offs in terms of slower performance over USB 3 connections, I believe that these speeds are still very respectable and represent a significant upgrade over standard USB drives.

The fact that the Oraco enclosure is available now at a relatively affordable price point of £150-£170 makes it an even more compelling option for users who want to take advantage of USB4 technology without breaking the bank. Overall, I'd highly recommend the Oraco USB4 External Drive Enclosure to anyone looking to upgrade their connectivity options and take their workflow to the next level.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday i'm testing a usb4 nvme drive enclosure with the m1 max macbook pro and this should be interesting because so far we've seen pretty mixed usb performance from apple's m1 machines when using usb 3 devices so how will this usb4 enclosure fare there's a lot of confusion between usb and thunderbolt so it might be helpful for us to get just a little bit of background first and if you're familiar with usb and thunderbolt standards well then skip ahead a little these two different standards can be quite confusing because usb 3 and 4 along with thunderbolt 3 and 4 all use this type c connector and that's often referred to as a usbc connector just to further confuse matters but these standards are not the same let's take an example a usb 3 device will work on a computer that has thunderbolt 3 ports but the reverse is not true you can't plug a thunderbolt 3 device into a computer that only has usb 3. and this is where usb4 comes in because it actually incorporates thunderbolt 3 as part of its standard so usb 4 and thunderbolt 3 are to some extent interchangeable and you get that faster bandwidth that thunderbolt offers of 40 gigabits per second now remember that's usb4 incorporates thunderbolt 3. sometimes usb4 and thunderbolt 4 are confused with each other but thunderbolt 4 is actually a stricter version of thunderbolt 3. it's got the same speed 40 gigabits per second as thunderbolt 3 has but there are a number of additional requirements behind the scenes that mean that actually some external devices are likely to be faster over thunderbolt 4 than they are over thunderbolt 3. the original m1 machines don't comply with these additional requirements that come under thunderbolt 4 and that's why the ports are described as usb4 in contrast though the m1 pro and m1 max machines do have thunderbolt 4 compatibility in previous tests we've shown that the original m1 machines lag considerably behind intel machines that's intel macs and pcs when it comes to usb 3 speeds for external drives the m1 pro and m1 max machines however have got better usb 3 performance although it's still not as good as you'll find on equivalent pcs and intel max so this is why i'm interested to see whether a usb 4 drive will offer decent performance what can we expect the original m1 max well they have usb4 ports and these new macs well they have thunderbolt 4 ports so we should be able to get maximum performance from this enclosure oracle sent this one over for me to test without any charge but as always i only accepted on the basis that i'm free to give an honest opinion and i retain full editorial control this is the m2v01-c4 model catchy name finished in this nice blue-gray aluminium and it claims full support for usb4 with that 40 gigabit transmission rate oracles say that it should deliver sequential read performance of 2700 megabytes per second and sequential write performance at 1400. though that of course will depend on the drive that you choose to put inside the enclosure now in the box we get the enclosure itself a type a to type c usb 3 cable a type c to type c usb 4 cable an m.2 retaining screw a torx driver some manuals and a thermal pad the enclosure is opened by removing one torx screw which is quite stiff but once open we can install an m.2 nvme drive and i'm using this western digital black sn750 500 gigabyte model we simply secure the ssd with the retaining screw using the same torx t5 screwdriver the thermal pad sticks to the ssd and provides conductivity to the enclosure which has got this nice sort of heat sink design on it and that's because ssds get hot really quickly especially when they're running at full speed and once they get hot they will start to throttle their speed this enclosure is made out of solid metal and it feels of an appropriate size that it should be able to keep those temperatures under control but there's no denying that it will get warm in use the quality looks good and at one end we've got the type c port and an activity led the supplied cable is quite short but of course you can use any thunderbolt 3 thunderbolt 4 or usb 4 cable with it it will also work with usb 3 cables but the speeds might reduce i tested this enclosure with a couple of my high quality thunderbolt cables to check that the included cable performs properly and i'm pleased to say that it does there's a key benefit to usb4 over thunderbolt 3 enclosures because usb4 incorporates that thunderbolt 3 standard but is also backwards compatible with usb it means that you can use this on any computer whether it has thunderbolt or usb the only thing that changes is the speed uh pricing for this enclosure by the way on amazon is 170 or 150 pounds and i've popped some links in the description if you want to pick one of these up for yourself so let's test the speed using blackmagic disk speed test on my m1 mac mini and we're seeing 350 megabytes per second on right and 2729 on read so that's pretty much bang on oracle's claims for this enclosure and represents very usable performance indeed i think m1 mac owners would be very pleased with that but the numbers will vary between each test that we do and it depends how hot the drive gets so i allowed it to cool down between each test and what i'm presenting here is the average of a number of runs and remember my focus in this video is on the maximum performance of the ports those are on the mac and the one on this enclosure the actual speed of the device will depend on the ssd that you choose to put inside so i'm not going to do any deep dive testing in this video but you should certainly expect that what we're showing you are maximum speeds and you probably find that they're a little bit slower in real world usage so let's run the same test now on the m1 max and we can see quite an increase in write speed 2135 megabytes per second and 27.47 on read so the read performance is pretty much the same as the m1 mac mini within a margin of error but those write speeds are significantly higher on the m1 max compared to the original m1 and i repeated the test several times and with different cables and this is the result so how come the right performance is so much higher than oracle's claim well maybe they're just being conservative how does it compare though to a pc i ran the same test on my razer blade notebook which has thunderbolt 4 ports just like the m1 max and we've got 1953 megabytes per second on right and 2420 on read again i ran this test many times and that is just the result for the razer blade notebook and other pc notebooks may fare differently depending on what chipsets they have inside so i'm not for a moment suggesting that the m1 max beats all pcs or anything like that but i was also interested to see what the performance of this enclosure would be over usb 3 that backwards compatibility so i plugged it into my think station which doesn't have thunderbolt but does have 10 gigabit usb 3. performance is much as expected at 873 megabytes per second on right and 915 on read and obviously that's a lot slower than the usb4 performance but isn't it great to have that backwards compatibility and you'll also be able to connect it via a type a usb port with that second included cable allowing you to run the drive on five gigabit usb and even older machines i was also keen to see what would happen if i connected this drive via a dock in this example i'm using the razer thunderbolt 4 dock with my m1 max and we run the same test and we get 1608 megabytes per second on right 27 46 on read so the dock isn't affecting read performance but it is slowing down the right performance although in this case it's still faster than the m1 mac mini managed and honestly in real world usage would you even be able to tell the difference so the new m1 pro and m1 max machines continue to impress and they do represent a genuine step up over the standard m1 when it comes to connectivity it's been frustrating to see my usb ssds run slower on these new machines than they do on my pcs and intel max so these results are a welcome change usb 4 will become more common and prices will come down and that's good news if your workflow involves external drives like these of course thunderbolt enclosures have always been available but sometimes you need to share files with a machine that doesn't have thunderbolt and that's where usb4 really fills the gap when it comes to external drive enclosures this oraco unit has really impressed me during the time i've been using it it's got a genuinely nice build quality it's a good size and it appears to work better than advertise so it gets a thumbs up from me and hopefully this video has been useful enough to earn a thumbs up from you don't forget also to optimize your youtube algorithm by hitting the subscribe button and i'll see you soon for some more geekery youtoday i'm testing a usb4 nvme drive enclosure with the m1 max macbook pro and this should be interesting because so far we've seen pretty mixed usb performance from apple's m1 machines when using usb 3 devices so how will this usb4 enclosure fare there's a lot of confusion between usb and thunderbolt so it might be helpful for us to get just a little bit of background first and if you're familiar with usb and thunderbolt standards well then skip ahead a little these two different standards can be quite confusing because usb 3 and 4 along with thunderbolt 3 and 4 all use this type c connector and that's often referred to as a usbc connector just to further confuse matters but these standards are not the same let's take an example a usb 3 device will work on a computer that has thunderbolt 3 ports but the reverse is not true you can't plug a thunderbolt 3 device into a computer that only has usb 3. and this is where usb4 comes in because it actually incorporates thunderbolt 3 as part of its standard so usb 4 and thunderbolt 3 are to some extent interchangeable and you get that faster bandwidth that thunderbolt offers of 40 gigabits per second now remember that's usb4 incorporates thunderbolt 3. sometimes usb4 and thunderbolt 4 are confused with each other but thunderbolt 4 is actually a stricter version of thunderbolt 3. it's got the same speed 40 gigabits per second as thunderbolt 3 has but there are a number of additional requirements behind the scenes that mean that actually some external devices are likely to be faster over thunderbolt 4 than they are over thunderbolt 3. the original m1 machines don't comply with these additional requirements that come under thunderbolt 4 and that's why the ports are described as usb4 in contrast though the m1 pro and m1 max machines do have thunderbolt 4 compatibility in previous tests we've shown that the original m1 machines lag considerably behind intel machines that's intel macs and pcs when it comes to usb 3 speeds for external drives the m1 pro and m1 max machines however have got better usb 3 performance although it's still not as good as you'll find on equivalent pcs and intel max so this is why i'm interested to see whether a usb 4 drive will offer decent performance what can we expect the original m1 max well they have usb4 ports and these new macs well they have thunderbolt 4 ports so we should be able to get maximum performance from this enclosure oracle sent this one over for me to test without any charge but as always i only accepted on the basis that i'm free to give an honest opinion and i retain full editorial control this is the m2v01-c4 model catchy name finished in this nice blue-gray aluminium and it claims full support for usb4 with that 40 gigabit transmission rate oracles say that it should deliver sequential read performance of 2700 megabytes per second and sequential write performance at 1400. though that of course will depend on the drive that you choose to put inside the enclosure now in the box we get the enclosure itself a type a to type c usb 3 cable a type c to type c usb 4 cable an m.2 retaining screw a torx driver some manuals and a thermal pad the enclosure is opened by removing one torx screw which is quite stiff but once open we can install an m.2 nvme drive and i'm using this western digital black sn750 500 gigabyte model we simply secure the ssd with the retaining screw using the same torx t5 screwdriver the thermal pad sticks to the ssd and provides conductivity to the enclosure which has got this nice sort of heat sink design on it and that's because ssds get hot really quickly especially when they're running at full speed and once they get hot they will start to throttle their speed this enclosure is made out of solid metal and it feels of an appropriate size that it should be able to keep those temperatures under control but there's no denying that it will get warm in use the quality looks good and at one end we've got the type c port and an activity led the supplied cable is quite short but of course you can use any thunderbolt 3 thunderbolt 4 or usb 4 cable with it it will also work with usb 3 cables but the speeds might reduce i tested this enclosure with a couple of my high quality thunderbolt cables to check that the included cable performs properly and i'm pleased to say that it does there's a key benefit to usb4 over thunderbolt 3 enclosures because usb4 incorporates that thunderbolt 3 standard but is also backwards compatible with usb it means that you can use this on any computer whether it has thunderbolt or usb the only thing that changes is the speed uh pricing for this enclosure by the way on amazon is 170 or 150 pounds and i've popped some links in the description if you want to pick one of these up for yourself so let's test the speed using blackmagic disk speed test on my m1 mac mini and we're seeing 350 megabytes per second on right and 2729 on read so that's pretty much bang on oracle's claims for this enclosure and represents very usable performance indeed i think m1 mac owners would be very pleased with that but the numbers will vary between each test that we do and it depends how hot the drive gets so i allowed it to cool down between each test and what i'm presenting here is the average of a number of runs and remember my focus in this video is on the maximum performance of the ports those are on the mac and the one on this enclosure the actual speed of the device will depend on the ssd that you choose to put inside so i'm not going to do any deep dive testing in this video but you should certainly expect that what we're showing you are maximum speeds and you probably find that they're a little bit slower in real world usage so let's run the same test now on the m1 max and we can see quite an increase in write speed 2135 megabytes per second and 27.47 on read so the read performance is pretty much the same as the m1 mac mini within a margin of error but those write speeds are significantly higher on the m1 max compared to the original m1 and i repeated the test several times and with different cables and this is the result so how come the right performance is so much higher than oracle's claim well maybe they're just being conservative how does it compare though to a pc i ran the same test on my razer blade notebook which has thunderbolt 4 ports just like the m1 max and we've got 1953 megabytes per second on right and 2420 on read again i ran this test many times and that is just the result for the razer blade notebook and other pc notebooks may fare differently depending on what chipsets they have inside so i'm not for a moment suggesting that the m1 max beats all pcs or anything like that but i was also interested to see what the performance of this enclosure would be over usb 3 that backwards compatibility so i plugged it into my think station which doesn't have thunderbolt but does have 10 gigabit usb 3. performance is much as expected at 873 megabytes per second on right and 915 on read and obviously that's a lot slower than the usb4 performance but isn't it great to have that backwards compatibility and you'll also be able to connect it via a type a usb port with that second included cable allowing you to run the drive on five gigabit usb and even older machines i was also keen to see what would happen if i connected this drive via a dock in this example i'm using the razer thunderbolt 4 dock with my m1 max and we run the same test and we get 1608 megabytes per second on right 27 46 on read so the dock isn't affecting read performance but it is slowing down the right performance although in this case it's still faster than the m1 mac mini managed and honestly in real world usage would you even be able to tell the difference so the new m1 pro and m1 max machines continue to impress and they do represent a genuine step up over the standard m1 when it comes to connectivity it's been frustrating to see my usb ssds run slower on these new machines than they do on my pcs and intel max so these results are a welcome change usb 4 will become more common and prices will come down and that's good news if your workflow involves external drives like these of course thunderbolt enclosures have always been available but sometimes you need to share files with a machine that doesn't have thunderbolt and that's where usb4 really fills the gap when it comes to external drive enclosures this oraco unit has really impressed me during the time i've been using it it's got a genuinely nice build quality it's a good size and it appears to work better than advertise so it gets a thumbs up from me and hopefully this video has been useful enough to earn a thumbs up from you don't forget also to optimize your youtube algorithm by hitting the subscribe button and i'll see you soon for some more geekery you\n"