// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
ORICO X50 Review: A Sleek Thunderbolt 5 SSD Enclosure
A few months back, I reviewed the TerraMaster D1 SSD Plus and liked it for what it offered. A sturdy box that gives a second life to an NVMe SSD lying around (rarity these days).
Now I have the ORICO X50 on my desk, which does the same job but promises twice the bandwidth with Thunderbolt 5.
I ran the similar set of benchmarks on it on Ubuntu, and I have the numbers to share.
Here's a quick summary of my experience with the device.
Here are the hardware specifications for ORICO X50.
ORICO also sells the X50 with a 512GB or 1TB SSD already installed. I got the empty enclosure, which is what most of you would want if you have an SSD to reuse.
Pay attention to the supported SSD list. Like most enclosures of this kind, the X50 doesn't take everything. It's NVMe only, so your old SATA M.2 drive cannot be used, and it's 2280 only, so the tiny 2230 SSD in your stock won't be of much use either.
Also note that on Thunderbolt 4 hosts, the speed is limited to 40Gbps, and on Thunderbolt 3, it will drop even further.
The X50 is noticeably less bulky than the TerraMaster D1 SSD Plus. It's slim enough to slide into a laptop bag pocket. Although it is not as slim as my Sandisk Extreme portable SSD.
The silver aluminum finish looks good, and I think it would fit right into the Apple ecosystem as it matches the aesthetic.