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China, Beijing
1 Level
701 Review
52 Karma

Review on πŸ”’ Cable Matters Dual Bay 2.5 Inch External SSD Enclosure: 10Gbps Aluminum USB C Enclosure with RAID Support - Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 / Thunderbolt 3 Compatible by Robert Capers

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Hard Case for Computer Accessories and Peripherals

TL;DR: I'm giving 4 stars instead of 5 because the case was limited to 6Gb/s (SATA III Single Speed) in JBOD mode, which was my intended use case. The full 10 Gb/s was achievable in RAID 0. At first this case looks like a rebrand of an identical Inateck case. Given that the Inateck case has an earlier date when it was first listed on Revain, I'm inclined to believe that Cable Matters is a rebrand and not the other way around. I personally don't like the rebranding, but it doesn't affect my rating. I ran several performance tests on this case. What I was most interested in was: * Are the full 10 Gb/s achievable in all modes? * Can the device be powered in all modes from a single USB 3.0 (or 3.1 Gen 1 or 3.2 Gen 1 or . ) port? Test setup: * Hades Canyon Nuc with Ubuntu 20.04 * Lenovo Yoga with Ubuntu 19.04 * 1 x 500 GB WD Blue M.2 SSD * 1 500 GB Samsung Evo 850 2.5" SSD * Sabrent M.2 Adapter 2.5" (for WD Blue drive) Queue depth 32 * No file system was used and no actual files were transferred. Power Delivery I was able to connect the device and both drives to a single USB 3 port without additional power. I was able to do this in both JBOD and RAID 0 modes and sustained writes for at least 17 minutes on a battery-powered laptop. Larger SSDs use power, but looking at the WD spec sheet for the SSD I'm using shows only a slight increase in power consumption when going from 500GB to 4TB. Speed. This was a bit disappointing as the JBOD mode couldn't reach the full speed the device can run at. Instead, I seemed stuck at the speed of a single SATA III device. Each drive was able to hit full speed (550MB/s), but when I tested both drives simultaneously, their individual speeds were cut in half (both drives were running at 270MB/s). Apparently this was tested on a USB 3.1 Gen2 port. Running RAID 0 allowed me to get full bus speed (920MB/s). Tested again on a USB 3.1 Gen2 port. When working with a USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 Gen1 port, the speed was reduced by half compared to what was expected (408 MB/s). When I tested in RAID 0, smart data was transferred from one of the drives (WD). One bug I noticed was that the device would freeze for a moment when trying to collect SMART data while writing large amounts of data at the same time. me. However, there are a few raised areas on the sides that make the Sabrent's chassis *very* narrow. Also, I had a 1TB WD HDD Slim lying around and it could fit just as well, albeit with the same density as the Sabrent case. I was able to run both a Samsung SSD and a WD Slim HDD at the same time without an additional power supply, although I didn't test the hard drive extensively. I ended up with 4 different drives and cases from 3 different vendors and 2 media. guys, and they all worked fine in this case (this might be a renamed case, but Cable Matters definitely picked a good device to rename ;)).

Pros
  • Hard Drive Accessories
Cons
  • Minor Issues