3 hours ago
7
Thunderbolt 5 is finally reaching real-world machines, and the enclosure market is catching up. The ORICO X50 is a new fanless option supporting TB5 compatibility, and after testing it out, I think it’s worth checking out.
The pitch is straightforward: the X50 is a fanless M.2 NVMe enclosure built around Thunderbolt 5 compatibility, promising 80 Gbps of bandwidth and the kind of sustained performance that usually requires a fan strapped to the side of a bulky enclosure. Instead, ORICO used multiple layers of futuristic materials to efficiently pull heat from your drive and dissipate it, letting you keep moving files around at top speed.
Installation in this enclosure-only unit is incredibly easy. Unscrew the back, drop the drive in, lay down the thermal pad, close it up. The included screwdriver is a nice touch, although the use of reasonably sized Phillips screws also means you aren't tied to their driver. I had it assembled and formatted in under five minutes. The included Thunderbolt 5 cable is good quality, but relatively short at 20 inches or 0.5 m.
Plugged into a Thunderbolt 5 port, I saw transfer rates land around 5,400 MB/s. That is not quite the headline 6,000 MB/s figure ORICO advertises, but it is in the ballpark, and more importantly, it held there consistently. Across both synthetic benchmarks and multi-hundred-gigabyte folders of photo and video work, I saw zero disconnects and zero thermal throttling events.
That consistency is the entire reason to care about the cooling design. ORICO rates the enclosure to keep surface temps below 45 °C under sustained load, and the case only got comfortably warm rather than hot to the touch even after extended workloads. That matters because modern NVMe controllers start throttling in the 70 to 80 °C range, and once a drive starts throttling, it can be incredibly frustrating to work with.
Fanless designs, especially for a portable product, are a big plus. Fans add noise on a set, make dust or water damage more likely, and they are usually the first thing to fail. A passive enclosure that can actually keep up with a Thunderbolt 5 SSD removes a real annoyance.
Backward compatibility is the other thing I want to point out because Thunderbolt 5 ports are still pretty rare. Outside of Apple's M4 Pro and newer machines, and a handful of high-end Windows laptops, most devices are going to be shipping with a Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 port. The good news is that the fallback works gracefully. On a USB4 host I still got the kind of performance I expect from a well-built USB4 enclosure: about 4,000 MB/s, the real-world cap of a 40 Gb/s port.
The only challenge with this enclosure, or any driveless enclosure for that matter, is not ORICO's fault, but just because of the overall rough state of the SSD market. Prices on the high-end PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 drives you would actually want to pair with a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure have climbed sharply over the last few months, and availability on a lot of the obvious choices is spotty. I was lucky to have a spare drive on hand to test with, but if you are starting from scratch, you should find the drive you want to use before you go for the enclosure. There is no point paying for 80 Gbps of bandwidth that you can't use.
So who is the X50 for? It's a great fit for the photographer or filmmaker who already owns a machine with Thunderbolt 5 and wants the best performance. If you fit that description, this is one of the best ways to get fast portable storage with zero compromises.
If you are still on a Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 machine and have no plans to upgrade soon, the X50 will absolutely still work for you, but you would probably be happier saving some money and buying a dedicated USB4 enclosure, because the Thunderbolt 5 premium is real.
Overall, the X50 has been a great product in testing and in the field. I’d suggest pairing it with a 2 or 4 TB SSD, based on availability and pricing, like this 4 TB model from ORICO or this 4 TB model from WD. For those bare drives, check pricing per TB, expect low stock, and make sure to buy from legitimate sellers.
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