Enclosure for Dell XPS 13 9360 512 GB pcie nvme Gen 3 4 lanes SSD?

If the drive is recognized but not readable, it's either corrupt -- or damaged.  If you need the data from the drive, there's not much you can do as an end user.  It may be possible to recover the drive - but you'll need a data recovery or forensics service to tackle that job.  If the data is worth the cost, don't do anything further to the drive before you have it evaluated.  SSD recovery isn't inexpensive (it'll likely wind up well over the cost of the system initially), but anything you do at this point will simply reduce the chances of getting the data back.

There are several well-regarded recovery services from the likes of Gillware, Ontrack, Drive Savers and others.

@PakRoti  you shouldn't expect to be able to boot from the SSD located in the enclosure.  If it uses USB to communicate with the system rather than Thunderbolt 3, then Windows does not allow itself to be booted from a device attached via USB, except for Windows To Go installations that require enterprise licensing and special preparation.  In addition, a Windows installation set up for one system quite often will not boot properly on a completely different system with different hardware -- so even if you were to install that SSD internally, it might not boot.

When you say that "the drive is recognized" by your new system, what exactly does that mean?  Are you just seeing a device in Device Manager?  Or do you see the disk including its entire partition layout in Disk Management?

NVMe to USB enclosures are still somewhat new, and they still seem to be somewhat hit or miss.  I see that Plugable recently started offering one.  I haven't used that product specifically, but I tend to trust Plugable as a source for high quality products, so you might find that a different enclosure works differently for you.  But again, first I'm curious to understand at what level your system is detecting the current SSD.  If you can post a screenshot of what you see in the lower half of the center window of Disk Management, that might be useful.

Well, my drive was fine up until the point when my motherboard died. I am pretty sure it is just fine. The dead motherboard was confirmed by a local shop who could also not give me any good advice about where to find an appropriate enclosure for my drive. Perhaps my drive was destroyed in the computer as well, but it is dooubtful. The death of my old computer was gradual, so it was not a power surge or anything like that.

I have seen indications of the same problem with finding enclosures that will support this drive and readable by newer computers (USB 3.1) on reddit and elsewhere including commentary about the various enclosures available that will not support reading drives that are already partitioned. I am stuck.

Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks for the reply.

Thanks for the response. I understand what you are saying about windows not being capable to boot from a USB like is has been in almost the past for 20+ years (excuse the sarcasm - I am getting old). I accept this feature that is now part of Windows - I am assuming for the security? In any case, this is ok.

Regarding the device and drive being detected, in fact it does show up in the windows disk management utility. As shown in the screenshot. As you can see, the options to take any action on this partition in this utility are not available (greyed out). This is certainly a disk with data on it. I have also included a screenshot of the device manager dialog when I click on "hardware". Any suggestions on how to read the files system would be greatly appreciated.

To the comment about the disk controller interface being "new", my old XPS 13 is over 3 years old. I would not consider this new in this age. I am not taking a shot at you, but I have seen this comment from other threads on the web. It translates to: the interface was developed, it is not liked accepted, it is soon going to be obsolete and no equipment manufacturer is going to support it well.  It is certainly mysterious that the controller interface standard scheme is nine years old, but the SSDs for which it was developed do not seem to be well supported by anyone.

Thanks for the response, any more assistance would be sincerely appreciated. I will look at the manufacturer "pluggable" as you suggested as well.

Cheers,

Brad

@PakRoti  I'll take a look at your screenshots as soon as Dell moderators approve them for public viewing.  Until then, they're only visible to you and them.

As to your comment about my note about the disk controller being new, that had nothing at all to do with your system.  My point was that NVMe to USB bridge chips are still new.  Yes, NVMe has been around for a while, and USB has been around for quite a while longer, but the chips that will translate NVMe commands to USB UASP or BOT language, which is what USB-attached storage uses, are new.  Before you get salty with someone, especially someone who's volunteering their time trying to help some who to them is just a random person on the Internet, you should at least be sure that you understand their meaning.

@PakRoti  well the good news is that it's unlikely your SSD is damaged.  The bad news is that your enclosure is likely the culprit here.  The behavior of the disk showing up with a capacity of 16 TB and just having a single GPT Protective Partition is what I remember seeing with older, SATA-based disk enclosures that implemented an ugly hack in order to allow disks larger than 2TB to work with Windows XP.  Basically, Windows XP wouldn't normally work with those because it didn't support GPT disks, but MBR disks typically maxed out at 2TB because MBR only allowed disks with a certain number of sectors, and using the standard 512-byte sector size, that max worked out to 2TB.  So those disk enclosures worked around this by claiming that the disk had a sector size of 4K rather than 512 bytes and then "translated" all of the system's calls to particular sector numbers as needed.  With an 8x larger apparent sector size, suddenly it was possible to have an MBR disk up to 16TB.  The downside to this hack design is that a) if you ever removed that disk and installed it somewhere else that didn't implement this ugly hack, the disk would be unreadable, and b) if you ever took a disk that was originally set up somewhere else and installed it INTO an enclosure that did this, the disk would once again be unreadable, at least until you wiped it and re-initialized it within the enclosure.  The reason is that certain data on the disk is expected to be at "Sector #X" -- but Sector #X will be a completely different part of the disk if you're using 512 bytes per sector vs. 4K per sector.

There's a test to check whether an enclosure is doing this, but it requires being able to connect a disk both through the enclosure and through an interface that is known NOT to do this, such as internally within a system, in order to see if the reported sector size changes between the two.  One way to check would be to open an elevated Command Prompt and run "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x:", replacing X with the drive letter of a partition on the disk.  You'd want to check the "Bytes Per Sector" line (not physical sector).  But using that mechanism requires that you have a readable partition with an assigned drive letter available on the disk when connected in each way -- which when dealing with an enclosure that does this typically means wiping and repartitioning the disk in in each context, which I realize you specifically want to avoid here.  You also need to use a disk that is known NOT to actually use 4K sectors itself.  These are called "4K Native" or 4Kn disks, and they're still pretty rare.

But if you're open to considering another enclosure, you could try contacting Plugable Support via email.  I don't know how their Support team is affected by COVID-19 right now, but they're generally fast to respond and very technically knowledgeable.  So reach out to them and say, "I have this specific SSD model.  It was originally installed internally into my Dell XPS 13 9360, but when I installed it into this other NVMe to USB enclosure I bought, it appears as a 16 TB disk containing a single GPT Protective Partition behavior.  If I buy your NVMe to USB enclosure, will I be able to read the data already on the SSD rather than having to wipe and repartition it while it's installed in your enclosure in order to make it usable?"  They'll very likely know exactly what you're talking about, because I myself talked with them about this issue when I originally encountered this behavior with SATA enclosures years ago.

@PakRoti  well as it happens, I just had a situation where reading an NVMe SSD from a USB enclosure would be handy, so I bought the Plugable adapter I suggested earlier, and although I'm using an Intel SSD rather than a Toshiba SSD, I can confirm that this NVMe SSD that was originally set up while installed in a Latitude 7480 is still perfectly readable when installed into this NVMe enclosure.

This sounds encouraging. I will try 5he pluggable enclosure.

Is this the Plugable Enclosure?

https://plugable.com/products/usbc-nvme