SilverStone MS12: The new high speed external box for M.2 SSD
External SSDs are not always favorable in terms of price. Compared to the price of an SSD and an enclosure itself, manufacturers like to be paid extra for the highest-performance models. Otherwise you might buy a cat (no-name SSD) in the sack, etc. Now, however, there is a good opportunity to buy an extra fast SilverStone MS12 enclosure and an SSD in M.2 format according to your own taste. And in terms of architecture, it looks quite attractive.
The SilverStone MS12 enclosure is specific primarily in supporting USB 3.2 gen 2×2 with twice the bandwidth (20 Gb/s) of the standard USB 3.2 gen 2. We have recently tested an SSD with this standard, remember WD Black P50 in 1 TB version. Its disadvantage is the relatively high price, you can’t buy it below 250 euros even today. At the same time, M.2 PCIe SSDs alone (without enclosure) with the same capacity and similar speed start at 110 euros and, in conversion to gigabytes, already have a dramatically better price-performance ratio than slower SATA SSDs (AHCI).
These are fully-featured 4-line modules with TLC or QLC memory. Although the maximum performance of these SSDs will not be used by the USB 3.2 gen 2×2, the SilverStone MS12 enclosure supports it. With the Samsung 960 Pro, according to the manufacturer’s documentation in CrystalDiskMark, they achieve sequential read and write speeds of up to 2074 MB/s and 2037 MB/s, respectively. According to the manufacturer, the enclosure is supposed to be designed so that it will keep the performance at the limit of its possibilities for a long time, more than 4 hours. In practice, however, the load times will be significantly lower and especially for cheaper SSDs with NAND memory of the TLC/QLC type, which rapidly lose the sequential write performance after filling the pSLC acceleration buffer.
The body of this enclosure is covered with fins to achieve better cooling and gain the largest possible surface area. At the same time, however, SilverStone wanted to keep small dimensions and the thickness stops at 15.3 mm and even the length (106.2 mm) or width (33.3 mm) of the MS12 80 mm SSD do not significantly exceed compatible dimensions. It’s only a little bigger than perhaps Patriot PXD. So who knows what heating level SilverStone considers to be “okay”, only the tests will show. In any case, the side panels absorb heat from both sides of the SSD via two thermal pads.
Supported M.2 SSD formats are with lengths of 80, 60 and 42 mm. The used ASMedia ASM2364 controller works exclusively with SSDs with the NVMe protocol, ie PCIe ×4/ ×2. So there is something to choose from, which is also one of the advantages of such designs, which you can put together yourself. In some fully-external SSDs, you do not simply replace the SSD itself with others (in case of failure or just the need for higher performance). Whether for their impregnable designs or because the USB controller is an integral part of the SSD.
The chassis material is otherwise aluminum and the weight without SSD is given at 53 g. A 30 cm long USB-C cable should be included in the package. The company has not set the availability or price yet, so hopefully they won’t ruin it with price. External enclosures with SSD PCIe support (NVMe) are generally relatively expensive and are priced at around eighty euros (Icy Box IB-1817M-C31), but also for thirty. The SilverStone MS12 is likely to head for the higher boundary.
English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi
