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  • iranterres - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Anandtech is in a wave of uninteresting reviews...sadly.
  • Charlie22911 - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Speak for yourself, as a person who travels and has had multiple Seagate\Western Digital portables fail I found this to be both relevant and informative.
  • MrSpadge - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Yep - didn't know such an option exists.
  • Samus - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Trollolol
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    I thought the review was interesting. Although I'm not searching for external storage, this is something different that warrants a look as it's not a single drive enclosure. The fact that it has RAID1 support might make it useful to quite a few readers.
  • bug77 - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link

    True, but I think most people will just slap mechanical HDDs in the enclosure and the review doesn't say anything about that...
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link

    Yeah, I can't argue with that. External storage enclosures are good candidates for mechanical drives. It's a really common scenario since a lot of people aren't as concerned about speed as they are about high capacity and cost effectiveness. On the other hand, testing with mechanical drives will be more of a test of the drives' performance than the enclosure since SSDs are probably the only things quick enough to push the USB interface hard enough to expose any shortcomings.
  • bug77 - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link

    It's not like testing with both SSDs and HDDs is unthinkable...
  • powerarmour - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    +1
  • rocketman122 - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link

    I agree somewhat.. As of late not so interesting reviews and they are less frequent. I think (me specifically) they should do a review of a product every day or 2. So much to review.
  • jb14 - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Jog on iranterres
  • iranterres - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Too bad if you like to insult people with opposite opinions.
  • Tony Merryfield - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Too bad you think everything has to revolve around your needs and interests.
  • iranterres - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Even worse when you have assumptions you're not aware of.
  • close - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    Then what exactly are you basing your statement that "Anandtech is in a wave of uninteresting reviews...sadly."?

    Have you conducted a survey among some or most readers? Have you found some markers that objectively prove that the reviews are "uninteresting"? Or were you just basing that solely on your personal opinions and preferences that you then generalized in your misplaced belief that they are relevant and matter to others?

    I actually don't expect an *good* answer. Reader quality has also gone down around here ;).
  • irusun - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    I think it's an interesting article and this seemed like a really weird article to unleash the "Anandtech is going downhill" comment (I'm paraphrasing).

    However, that aside, I've been visiting this site weekly for over 15 years, and its obviously changed a great deal over that time. An argument could be made that the quality has plummeted in recent years, which in turn drove away much of the long-time audience (or they at least became much less active readers/commenters), and in turn, they're left with a very, ahem, specific audience. In other words, audiences change based on the content, so maybe there's a correlation between reader quality and the quality of the site.

    I've been reading Ars for just as long, and that site has completely remade itself into a tech version of the Huffington Post... they've attracted a huge audience, but it's largely an unrecognizable audience to the way it was 10 years ago.

    p.s. no ill feelings towards the staff of Anandtech, and for certain technical areas, Anandtech still can't be beat. Keep up the good work as best you can!
  • iranterres - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link

    People are getting used to be so sensitive about facing opposite opinions, oh geez.

    I have never questioned the usefulness of the article, but the quality of the recent ones is bad. Looks rushed and some copy and paste galore. That's MY opinion like it or not as I do respect others and don't go bitching around about it.

    Maybe next time we need some thermal paste reviews...
  • Tony Merryfield - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Interestingly, all the revcontent content is about revcontent. Laughable, and in itself a terrible advert for the company.
  • irusun - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    I can't get over the utter stupidity of the USB forum creating completely unnecessary confusion with USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 naming conventions. Was USB 3.2 already taken? USB 4? Really, you know that they're were a bunch of guys at that meeting who were just laughing their asses off at the anticipated consumer confusion it was going to cause - I guarantee you they thought it was hilarious.
  • close - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    Initially there was no confusion. You had USB 3.0 since 2008 and USB 3.1 since 2013. Then someone decided it's a good idea to lend a hand to manufacturers that really had to market their sagging old products as having brand new features... by just changing a few characters on a specsheet.

    Manufacturers just "convinced" USB-IF that they should just be allowed to use the same USB 3.0 controllers but call them USB 3.1 thus tricking most users, increasing sales and cutting costs based on what could only be called a lie.

    The specs for 3.0 and 3.1 are pretty similar, certainly nothing on the difference between 2.0 and 3.0 so calling them 3.0 and 3.1 made perfect sense - tiny version increment.

    Don't forget that the USB-IF is a non profit organisation so money must be made somehow... You can thank the following people/companies for this:
    HP Inc. - Alan Berkema
    Intel Corporation - Brad Saunders
    Microsoft Corporation - Toby Nixon
    Renesas Electronics - Philip Leung
    STMicroelectronics - Joel Huloux
  • Meteor2 - Sunday, November 20, 2016 - link

    I believe there is a subtle difference between 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1 -- the latter uses a more efficient encoding scheme, so real-world performance is better even though the theoretical data rate is the same.

    Personally though I just check new devices for Gen 2. No Gen 2, no buy. Yeah, it would be better if it had been USB 3.2 or 4, but 'Gen 2' is easy-enough to remember.
  • Meteor2 - Sunday, November 20, 2016 - link

    I'm right in thinking that these devices are limited by the 'downstream' SATA interface, rather than the USB link, aren't I? Gen 1 can shift about 600 MBps but Gen 2 can transfer 1200. So it would need NVMe drives for the upstream link to become saturated.
  • vladx - Thursday, November 24, 2016 - link

    You forgot the encoding overhead, Gen 1 tops around 480 MBps and Gen 2 at ~1000 MBps.
  • ironwing - Sunday, November 20, 2016 - link

    Ganesh, were you provided any drop test certifications or test results for this drive? The "ToughTech" name implies that the unit is ruggedized but I don't see any mention of shock resistance in the review. Is the unit ruggedized comparable to a LaCie or Transcend external drive?
  • AKMtnr - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link

    RE: reviewso n Anandtech: I'm just happy to have a break from the constant onslaught of SSD's that are only slightly different than each other!

    I have the FW800/eSATA version of the Tough Tech Duo and being able to run dual drives without having to lug around external power has been awesome. (I do a lot of photography and videography, mostly in remote places with a backpack and not much else). I had a HDD die and had to shell out $1900, so I'm pretty into RAID1 drives now. (in addtion to online backups, calm down, I know "RAID IS NOT A BACKUP") I'm too poor for SSD's though, I put two 2TB HDD's in it.

    Will definitely look into this one now that I got a touchbar MBP a couple days ago. Trying to leave the donglelife, and this brand has been rock solid in build quality and reliability.

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