By now I have 2 of those Ugreen M.2 NVMe USB 3.2 SSD enclosures. One of them is attached to my DELL monitor which is attached to my MacBook Pro M1 for TimeMachine backups and just works™ for almost 4 months now.
I’ve recently bought a second one (and also the same SSD as in my TimeMachine one) to use with my Raspberry Pi 5. But for some reason, this one caused a bit of trouble. After a random number of hours of working fine, the Raspberry Pi suddenly becomes unresponsive. It’s still doing something as it heats up a lot, but it’s unreachable in that state. And since I have it running headless, I can’t even check whether it printed something on the screen.
This made me look for firmware updates for this enclosure and brought me to bensuperpc/rtl9210-firmware on GitHub.
My enclosure has the Realtek RTL9210B chip (there’s also one without the B!), so I’ve downloaded version 1.33.44 (18 Jan 2024) from the firmware folder of that repo to my Windows laptop and unpacked it.
Dumping my device’s data revealed that its original firmware is 1.29.38 (25 Apr 2022) and if the changelog in that repo’s README can be trusted, there were some stability fixes between that version and the latest one.
I’ve also learned that this enclosure has some power-saving feature after 10 minutes of presumed inactivity – which some computers see as a “forced disconnect”. Luckily, this can be disabled.
So, I’ve followed the instructions to create my own configuration (make sure to also remove the SCSI_VENDOR and SCSI_PRODUCT lines from your custom config if they show "n/a") and made sure to also remove the DISK_IPS_THRES value to disable the power-saving stuff.
Finally, I’ve flashed the newer firmware. (Remove your SSD before doing this, or it might get formatted in the process.)
This finished successfully after like 30 seconds and, after inserting the SSD and connecting it to my Raspberry Pi again, it came up as if nothing happened. Now, we’ll wait whether things improved.
If it still randomly freezes, I’ll probably revert the TRIM hack and see if that brings any improvements.