I'm having trouble reaching speeds above 30-40 MB/s when transferring files using an enclosure for my NVMe SSDs. I've tried two different drives, both less than two years old with light usage, and they should support speeds around 3000 MB/s read and 1500 MB/s write. Despite this, when I test them using CrystalDiskMark or a basic read/write test with a 3GB file, I'm maxing out at those low speeds, which is slower than the 120 MB/s I get with my old spinning 3.5" HDD. I've connected these NVMe drives to both USB-C 3.1 ports on my Surface Pro and on my desktop, using a few different high-quality cables. It seems like everything is set up correctly, so I'm not sure why the transfer rates are so low. Any suggestions to improve this?
1 Answer
It sounds like you might have a problem with your enclosure or the way it's communicating with your device. Have you tried using the cables that came with the enclosure? Sometimes they can make a big difference. If you haven't already, I recommend contacting Scorptec for support or seeing if they can check your enclosure. You might also want to try a different brand of enclosure altogether; I’ve had good experiences with mBeat and Simplecom products. Lastly, check if your drives are encrypted—if they are, it could be slowing things down too.

I wasn't sure about the encryption, but I think Windows does that during installation. These drives are freshly formatted as NTFS. I'll look into that and see if trying a different enclosure helps. Thanks for the advice!