Macworld - USA (2019-10-B)

36 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019

MACUSER REVIEW: FLEDGING SHELL THUNDERBOLT 3

Fledging’s Shell USB 3.1 (go.macworld.
com/shll) sports a fan that keeps it very
cool. Why the company didn’t provide one
for the higher-voltage Shell Thunderbolt, I
can’t say. Perhaps it’s about form and
aesthetics. Or maybe it was the only
design available. I’d rather have a drive
that’s a bit larger that can stay cool.
Bear in mind that the excessive heat I
experienced occurred after about 20
minutes of constant testing. Normal, light use
leaves the drive only warm to the touch.
Fledging supplies a screwdriver to
remove the four screws securing the top of
the case. Inside you’ll find a single 2280
M.2 slot and a small screw to secure your
NVMe SSD in the slot. There’s a Type-C
port for connecting the Shell to your recent
vintage Mac; however, there’s no AC jack or
adapter. That means you can’t use the
bus-powered Shell with older Thunderbolt 1
or 2 Macs using the Apple adapter, which
doesn’t pass through device power.

PERFORMANCE
The Fledging Shell Thunderbolt 3’s
performance can vary wildly depending on
the NVMe SSD you populate it with, but
testing proved that the enclosure itself is not a
bottleneck. I tested the Shell with a Samsung
970 EVO and the results were very similar to
the Samsung X5—the one exception being
the 48GB copy test. I had on hand only a
500GB 970 EVO, while the X5 was 1TB. The

500GB model runs out of secondary cache

and dips in performance much earlier.

Otherwise, the Shell performed almost

identically to the X5. Note that the

benchmarks, other than BlackMagic’s Disk

Speed, were run under Windows with Core

i7-5820. The Akitio Node Lite (go.macworld.

com/aknl) is a full-sized Thunderbolt 3

enclosure designed for PCIe cards which in

this case housed an Intel Optane 905P.

The Disk Speed test is indicative of the

speed you’ll get during normal operations

with the Fledging Shell Thunderbolt 3 with

a 970 EVO on board.

The following tests were run on IDG’s

storage testbed under Windows 10. Note

that the Fledging/970 EVO combo was

The Fledging Shell Thunderbolt 3 provides

just about the same performance as

Samsung’s X5 for a lot less money.