SilverStone TS11-C USB 3.1 Docking Station Review

Test Procedure

There are two things we are interested in when testing an enclosure like this. We want to know how well it perform by means of total speed possible as well as how big an effect the adapter will have on the transfer rates.

This is the same as we were looking for when testing USB 3.0 enclosures, but the increased performance of USB 3.1 forces us to rethink the testing methodology. My old testing drive has been used so much that it no longer provides stable results that can be used for comparisons, so it has to be replaced. Since USB 3.1 offers up to 10 Gbps, we need a faster drive and our real limitation won’t be the USB anymore, but the SATA3 with its 6 Gbps interface.

While we can’t fully utilize the USB 3.1 protocol due to the drive’s port limitations, we can still get a comparison to a native connection and see how much, if at all, the performance is impacted. Since there is a bridge from one bus to another, there should theoretically be a minor impact, but if that’s true is something that the benchmarks will tell us.

Test system:

• GA-Z170X-Gaming 7-EU
• Intel Core i5-6600K
• EVGA GTX 980 SC
• Kingston Fury DDR4 2400MHz 32GB
• Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB in RAID 0
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate

Software used:

• Windows 10 Pro 64Bit
• AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities 1.1.0
• AS SSD Benchmark 1.7.4739.38088
• ATTO Benchmark 2.46
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 64-bit

Drive in product

• OCZ Vector 180 960GB SATA3 SSD