Ugreen launches new SSD enclosure with Thunderbolt 5 and active cooling

There are several different approaches to expanding the storage of a laptop or PC, but only some external solutions offer very high data transfer rates via modern ports such as USB4 or Thunderbolt 5. Therefore, Ugreen has now introduced a new SSD enclosure that indeed relies on TB5 but is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 4, although at slower transfer speeds.

Needless to say, the theoretical maximum bandwidth of 80Gbps is only available on Thunderbolt 5-equipped machines. According to Ugreen, the new enclosure can hit sequential read and write speeds of well over 6,000MB/s with an accordingly quick SSD. The Chinese manufacturer provides some benchmarks with a few different M.2 storage modules, and drives such as the Samsung 990 Pro seem to perform very well.

That being said, the enclosure only supports M.2 2280 SSDs with the PCIe interface, not SATA. Furthermore, the enclosure sports some silicon padding that should protect it from drop damage, while the rest is made of aluminum. Additionally, a built-in fan is used to keep temperatures in check. The new Ugreen 80Gbps M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure is now available for $229 on Amazon, but this price does not include a solid-state drive.