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Once in a while you get hold of a product that surpasses expectations and this device is one of them from my perspective.
I had some spare SSDs laying around doing nothing from other upgrades and I decided to take a punt on a Sarbrent USB3 black external device to mount my SSDs externally.
Having read other reviews on amazon I realised that quite a lot of the negative reviews were non-tech savvy folks who were either expecting too much from old SSDs or are not getting the performance they expected because of USB3 implementations that don't support UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol).
UASP succeeds USB mass storage bulk-only transport (BOT) protocol and has a number of requirements such as:
1. OS is at least Windows 8
2. a motherboard that supports the Intel Platform Controller Hub (PCH) with UASP support (that to complicate matters is a licenced feature so not all motherboard manufacturers implement / enable the feature!).
3. not all usb ports are equal as their paths go to hubs on the motherboard that are not all the same technology, some may be labled SS (super speed) for example and others not so. The simplest method is to plug the usb device into a couple of ports until you see the device appear in device manager as a JMicron SCSI Disk Device. If you really want to see if UASP is in use you can then open the properties dialog and click the Details tab. From there select Property -> Device stack and see that '\Driver\UASPStor' is listed. This will show that UASP is in use for this device. Generally if you can see this then you are good to get the maximum speed you can. For me I'm getting a little over 350MB/s sequential I/O reading from an older OCZ Vertex 3 SSD in the Serbrent to a newer Samsung device on the SATA 3 bus. Obviously the OCZ is the limiting factor for me and the device is 100% busy whereas the newer Samsung is only ~40% busy writing the data.
Other things to note:
* now you're not going to get close to native sata3 (6GB/s speeds) for random I/O although USB3 at full bandwidth will get close for sequential I/O like copying a large movie for example.
* I quote windows and Intel above as these are what I have tried myself however I'm sure Linux may have a kernel that supports the feature by now and I'd be surprised if AMD don't have a similar supported implementation on their motherboards. so you'd need to check.
Quality aspects:
I feel the company has done very well for the price point for the physical quality of this enclosure. It comes in good packaging that's not too wasteful, you get a cloth bag (I guess this could be useful to avoid scratches while travelling) and I really like the compact design - this device is not much more bulky than the SSD itself!
Some people complain that the alloy is thin but to me that's the point of having alloy vs plastic isn't it? You get a nice thin compact surround that is plenty strong enough once the SSD is mounted inside. Yes the screws are small and the ends are plastic, and this is a cheap external device so in my opinion the quality good enough for most uses unless you're planning to throw this off a cliff...
The device itself is a good quality aluminium (mine is black) and all the cables are good quality. Its also worth noting that the device is bus powered so older laptop spinning disks may draw more power so you want to be careful if you are planning to add a whole bunch of these on an external hub that's not powered.
My only gripe is the sticky label that's stuck to the aluminium on the outside of the body. This takes a bit of work to remove and clean. It would be a nicer finish if the company solved this issue or avoided including the small paper coded label entirely (I expect this is for a robotic manufacturing / tracking process but this just spoils the aesthetic for me when the company obviously went through pains getting the look and feel right just to spoil it with a minor detail, anyway I'm nit picking).
So that wraps up my review. Hope this is of use to someone. I use an Intel Nuc btw and this is great for adding external silent, quick storage to the Nuc.
| Brand | Sabrent |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 12.45 x 7.62 x 1.27 cm; 68.04 Grams |
| Item model number | EC-UK30 |
| Manufacturer | Sabrent |
| Series | EC-UK30 |
| Color | Aluminum - Black |
| Form Factor | 2.5 inches |
| Hard Disk Description | Solid State Hard Drive |
| Hard Drive Interface | Serial ATA |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Item Weight | 67.9 g |
