Silverstone MS12 and Yottamaster HC2-C3 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20Gbps Enclosures Reviewed

Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO and CrystalDiskMark

Benchmarks such as ATTO and CrystalDiskMark help provide a quick look at the performance of the direct-attached storage device. The results translate to the instantaneous performance numbers that consumers can expect for specific workloads, but do not account for changes in behavior when the unit is subject to long-term conditioning and/or thermal throttling. Yet another use of these synthetic benchmarks is the ability to gather information regarding support for specific storage device features that affect performance.

Both SilverStone and Yottamaster claim read and write speeds of around 2000 MBps, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. ATTO benchmarking is restricted to a single configuration in terms of queue depth, and is only representative of a small sub-set of real-world workloads. It does allow the visualization of change in transfer rates as the I/O size changes, with optimal performance being reached around 512 KB for a queue depth of 4. The numbers for both the MS12 and HC2-C3 are similar, which is not a surprise in this section because the bridge chip as well as the internal SSD are the same. The effects of the thermal solution and other bridge chip firmware aspects are not evident in this quick benchmark.

ATTO Benchmarks
TOP: SilverStone MS12Yottamaster HC2-C3	BOTTOM: Yottamaster HC2-C3SilverStone MS12

CrystalDiskMark. on the other hand, uses four different access traces for reads and writes over a configurable region size. Two of the traces are sequential accesses, while two are 4K random accesses. Internally, CrystalDiskMark uses the Microsoft DiskSpd storage testing tool. The 'Seq128K Q32T1' sequential traces use 128K block size with a queue depth of 32 from a single thread, while the '4K Q32T16' one does random 4K accesses with the same queue configuration, but from multiple threads. The 'Seq1M' traces use a 1MiB block size. The plain 'Rnd4K' one uses only a single queue and single thread . Comparing the '4K Q32T16' and '4K Q1T1' numbers can quickly tell us whether the storage device supports NCQ (native command queuing) / UASP (USB-attached SCSI protocol). If the numbers for the two access traces are in the same ballpark, NCQ / UASP is not supported. This assumes that the host port / drivers on the PC support UASP.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmarks
TOP: SilverStone MS12Yottamaster HC2-C3	BOTTOM: Yottamaster HC2-C3SilverStone MS12

Both storage enclosures support UASP, as shown in the 'Rnd4K' numbers. The absolute numbers for both are essentially the same and within the expected run-to-run variations.