CRU ToughTech Duo C Storage Enclosure (2x 2.5" to USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C) Review
by Ganesh T S on November 18, 2016 8:00 AM ESTThermal Aspects and Power Consumption
The thermal design of external storage enclosures has now come into focus, as high-speed SSDs and interfaces such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 can easily drive up temperatures. This aspect is an important one, as the last thing that users want to see when copying over, say, 100 GB of data to the drive inside the enclosure, is the transfer rate going to USB 2.0 speeds. In order to identify the effectiveness with which the enclosure can take away heat from the internal drive(s), we instrumented our robocopy DAS benchmark suite to record various parameters while the robocopy process took place in the background. Internal temperatures can only be gathered for enclosures that support S.M.A.R.T passthrough. Readers can click on the graphs below to view the full-sized version. Note that the ASM1352R supports S.M.A.R.T. passthrough. In the RAID 0, RAID 1 and SPAN configurations, the statistics that are read out are from the first disk. The graphs below show the transfer rates as seen at the enclosure interface, but the temperatures is of the MX200 in the first slot.
| Storage Enclosure Thermal Characteristics | ||
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The enclosure has excellent thermal characteristics, with the drive temperature remaining below 50C even under sustained heavy traffic. There is no thermal throttling in the transfer rates also.
It is challenging to isolate the power consumption of the storage bridge alone while treating the unit as a black box. In order to study this aspect in a comparative manner, we use the same SSDs (Curcial MX200 500GB) in the units and process the same workloads on them (CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2's benchmark traces with a region size of 8GB and the number of repetitions set to 5). Plugable's USBC-TKEY power delivery sniffer was placed between the host PC and the storage bridge to record the power consumption. The average power consumption for each access trace was recorded. The pictures below present the numbers in a compact and easy to compare manner.
| Power Consumption - CrystalDiskMark | ||
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Due to the presence of two SSDs in the unit, the power consumption goes as high as 13.4 W. Not all Type-C ports support the 15W power delivery profile. It is advisable to keep the AC adapter handy while using the CRU ToughTech Duo C.
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jb14 - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Jog on iranterresiranterres - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Too bad if you like to insult people with opposite opinions.Tony Merryfield - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Too bad you think everything has to revolve around your needs and interests.iranterres - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Even worse when you have assumptions you're not aware of.close - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link
Then what exactly are you basing your statement that "Anandtech is in a wave of uninteresting reviews...sadly."?Have you conducted a survey among some or most readers? Have you found some markers that objectively prove that the reviews are "uninteresting"? Or were you just basing that solely on your personal opinions and preferences that you then generalized in your misplaced belief that they are relevant and matter to others?
I actually don't expect an *good* answer. Reader quality has also gone down around here ;).
irusun - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link
I think it's an interesting article and this seemed like a really weird article to unleash the "Anandtech is going downhill" comment (I'm paraphrasing).However, that aside, I've been visiting this site weekly for over 15 years, and its obviously changed a great deal over that time. An argument could be made that the quality has plummeted in recent years, which in turn drove away much of the long-time audience (or they at least became much less active readers/commenters), and in turn, they're left with a very, ahem, specific audience. In other words, audiences change based on the content, so maybe there's a correlation between reader quality and the quality of the site.
I've been reading Ars for just as long, and that site has completely remade itself into a tech version of the Huffington Post... they've attracted a huge audience, but it's largely an unrecognizable audience to the way it was 10 years ago.
p.s. no ill feelings towards the staff of Anandtech, and for certain technical areas, Anandtech still can't be beat. Keep up the good work as best you can!
iranterres - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
People are getting used to be so sensitive about facing opposite opinions, oh geez.I have never questioned the usefulness of the article, but the quality of the recent ones is bad. Looks rushed and some copy and paste galore. That's MY opinion like it or not as I do respect others and don't go bitching around about it.
Maybe next time we need some thermal paste reviews...
Tony Merryfield - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Interestingly, all the revcontent content is about revcontent. Laughable, and in itself a terrible advert for the company.irusun - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link
I can't get over the utter stupidity of the USB forum creating completely unnecessary confusion with USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 naming conventions. Was USB 3.2 already taken? USB 4? Really, you know that they're were a bunch of guys at that meeting who were just laughing their asses off at the anticipated consumer confusion it was going to cause - I guarantee you they thought it was hilarious.close - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link
Initially there was no confusion. You had USB 3.0 since 2008 and USB 3.1 since 2013. Then someone decided it's a good idea to lend a hand to manufacturers that really had to market their sagging old products as having brand new features... by just changing a few characters on a specsheet.Manufacturers just "convinced" USB-IF that they should just be allowed to use the same USB 3.0 controllers but call them USB 3.1 thus tricking most users, increasing sales and cutting costs based on what could only be called a lie.
The specs for 3.0 and 3.1 are pretty similar, certainly nothing on the difference between 2.0 and 3.0 so calling them 3.0 and 3.1 made perfect sense - tiny version increment.
Don't forget that the USB-IF is a non profit organisation so money must be made somehow... You can thank the following people/companies for this:
HP Inc. - Alan Berkema
Intel Corporation - Brad Saunders
Microsoft Corporation - Toby Nixon
Renesas Electronics - Philip Leung
STMicroelectronics - Joel Huloux