The potential of USB 3.1 Gen 2 is awesome. The thought of getting that much bandwidth from an external device was fascinating to me so I started my quest to find some peripherals that would try to take advantage of it. What surprised me in search was the lack of available devices. There are many 3.1 compatible devices but very few that support the Gen 2 10Gbps standard. I was shocked at the limited selection given the amount of time the standard has been out there.
In my searches, I did find a couple of devices that claimed to support the Gen 2 standard. The first is the Silverstone TS231U-C which is a two drive enclosure and the Oyen Digital single drive enclosure. I will review the single drive enclosure in another review but below is a quick video on my thoughts of the TS23U-C.
Fan
As I mentioned in the video, the fan is rather loud for my taste. As you can see from the pictures the fan wires are easily accessible so putting in a resistor to slow it down is possible. The fan is clearly visible but getting to the screws is bit tricky making the replacement of the fan challenging. Finding a quiet 70mm may also prove challenging.
Connectivity Problems
As I mentioned in the video, I had connectivity issues. I did isolate the connectivity issue to the cable. Most probably due to the length of the cable as I was using a longer 6ft cable I bought on Amazon. Though the cable I bought claimed to be certified, it did not work well with the Silverstone. Once I changed to a 1M (3.3ft) cable, the connectivity problems seemed to disappear and the unit connected flawlessly. I am not real surprised that things got a temperamental with the long cable especially given the speed of the interface.
Summary
In short this is a great product in the making but in my opinion it is way too loud to set on your desk. If you are willing to make some small modifications to slow down the fan, and limit yourself to a short cable, you will find the unit works pretty well and will max out the performance of your drives. If I choose to keep it, I am going to continue to work with this and possibly add some 2.5 inch adapters so I can test it with some SSDs in a RAID and push the speed of the 3.1 Gen 2 interface.
