XSReviews

There are plenty of NVMe drive enclosures on the market, with most encasing your super-speedy and hyper-compact SSD in a simple metal tube. The Orico Transparent NVMe enclosure looks a little different, with a transparent plastic housing and an integrated metal heatsink in black, blue, red or silver.

Orico sent us an enclosure to test, so let’s take a brief look at it and then determine what kind of performance we can expect.

The Orico enclosure is easy to use, with the two plastic halves sliding apart to reveal the internals. The drive lacks any mounting hardware, so the NVMe is simply held in place by the top half of the enclosure. A small pad is used on top of the gold pins to protect them from damage, although this partially slid off of our unit after the first use. Closing the lid is also easy, with hooks from the top half of the enclosure locking in place against corresponding latches in the bottom half. No screws are needed at any point, which could allow a mischievous child from accessing the drive without any tools – but this characteristic also speeds up drive swaps so it is understandable.

The drive comes with USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables, allowing use with any modern computer (but for best performance, USB-C to USB-C is ideal).

To test performance, we will compare the Orico enclosure against an Elecgear enclosure that costs slightly more (£35 vs £40), shown below.

To do this, we stuck the same ADATA SX8200 Pro drive into each enclosure and connected it to our computer with the same cable. We formatted the drive, then carried out a series of synthetic and real-world tests. Here are our results.

CrystalDiskMark

Orico (left) vs Elecgear (right)

First up is CrystalDiskMark, a good all-purpose test that measures sequential plus random I/O speeds. As you can see, the Orico enclosure (right) was capable of slightly higher sustained performance in every category, including a big advantage in write speeds, more than living up to the 900+MB/s claim made by the product specification.

Atto Bench

Orico (left) vs Elecgear (right)

Next up is Atto Disk Benchmark, a nice test which provides granular data on how read and write speeds are affected by chunk size. As before, the Orico enclosure slightly outperformed the Elecgear enclosure, perhaps due to a better thermal design.

File Copy Test

Orico (top) vs Elecgear (bottom)

In our final test, we copied a 34.4GB Counter-Strike: Global Offensive directory from an NVMe SSD to the enclosure in Windows and recorded the time taken to get an average write speed. We then copied the directory back to another location on the computer’s NVMe SSD and recorded the time for this to get an average read speed. This was repeated with each enclosure, with the destination directories wiped after each test. The Orico-enclosed drive (top results) was just marginally slower than the Elecgear-enclosed drive, to the tune of around 15 MB/s on each test.

Wrapping up

The Orico drive looks great and its performance is slightly better than an Elecgear metal enclosure at a similar price. Therefore, we can heartily recommend this drive.