Silverstone has a new accessory that can turn your M.2 form factor solid state drive into a USB thumb drive, provided you're ready to move onto something faster or more capacious (or both).
M.2 SSDs are those gum stick-sized SSDs that plug directly into a compatible motherboard. However, not all M.2 SSDs are the same—some still use the SATA bus and are limited to the same speeds at 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, while others are NVMe drives that tap into the PCI-Express bus for much faster read and write performance.
Silverstone's accessory will not appeal to everyone, as it won't work with NVMe or even PCIe-based M.2 drives. But we can see it having some utility for early M.2 adopters who picked up a SATA variant and now want to upgrade to a speedier NVMe SSD.
The MS09, as Silverstone calls it, is a "pocketable M.2 enclosure" made of anodized aluminum. It works with both 2260 and 2280 form factor M.2 SSDs up to 80mm in length, so it's longer than your typical thumb drive, measuring 110mm. Silverstone's accessory uses a VIA VL715 controller and has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A interface.
The enclosure is available now for around $36.
