This Plugable enclosure supports speeds of up to 10Gb/s over a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface. Slipping in the Lexar NM610 into the interface took me all of five seconds. This is a no-tool enclosure which means it can be opened and closed using a spring-loaded catch. I used an external NVMe SSD enclosure from Plugable to house the 500GB Lexar NM610 that I was testing.

MacFormat Magazine/Future via Getty Images Intel’s Thunderbolt standard is based on PCIe and is capable of some very fast speeds indeed.Īn Apple iMac Pro shown here has both USB 3 and Thunderbolt port that can be used to attach an NVMe. Sadly, Apple doesn’t allow its customers to use NVMe inside iMacs or Mac Minis so to get at least some of the benefits of NVMe, it’s necessary to resort to using it externally with a USB 3 or Thunderbolt enclosure. NVMe behaves more like RAM than like a conventional hard drive and that means it is much faster than an SATA interface. NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory express and it operates across a computer’s PCIe bus and is easy to install in the M2 form factor. You simply click it into place and that’s it. NVMe is a standard developed specifically for SSD storage by a group of companies that includes Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, Dell, and Seagate. My first solution for getting around this problem involves using a Lexar NVMe NM610 SSD drive. in computers but it is possible to use a drive externally on a Mac with a USB enclosure.

The Lexar NM610 is an NVMe SSD drive that is blisteringly fast.

Ssd external hard drive mac thunderbolt