Performance
For performance testing, I could hook the TD2 Thunderbolt3 Plus up to our testbench but that doesn’t fit what it is used for. So I pulled out my Razer Blade Stealth which is 3 years old now for testing. This is exactly the situation you would want something like the TD2, Thunderbolt passthrough for charging, dock functionality with DisplayPort and two USB 3.0 ports for a mouse and keyboard, and an ethernet jack to get everything hard-wired.
I then set out to test out how well it all works by installing two Crucial MX100 SSDs for the drives to get the highest possible speeds through the SATA interface to push the limits. For this I used CrystalDiskMark and I tested the TD2 with the two SSDs in all four of its drive modes. I knew that a few like Single and JBOD would perform similarly. But I wanted to be able to compare them all. Both had around 536 MB/s on the read speed and 463 for the writes. Then we have RAID 1 which clones the drive, it was similar on the read speed but was a little slower with 446 MB/s on the write speed which is due to it being written across both drives. Not a bad sacrifice for the protection it provides. Then the last test was with RAID0 wasn’t any faster on the 32 queue depth sequential test but was faster on the 32 queue depth write and the standard one queue depth sequential test which is saw 769 MB/s on the read. The slowdown here could be a limitation of the TD2, it's possible they didn’t plan for SSDs in raid. But it is still a big jump over the other tests!
Single
JBOD
RAID0
RAID1
Just to confirm things, I did also hook up the Sabrent XTRM Q which is a portable Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD, and test it. The read speeds weren’t an issue at all here, in fact, it performed close to what it did in my original review. The write performance was completely scuffed and I experienced this with this laptop when I tested it previously, it isn’t related to the Terra Master TD2. Just to confirm though and to see what the performance loss was when running the fast drive passing through the TD2 I tested again with it hooked up to my laptop. You can see there was a performance increase, but relatively small compared to the speeds.
Sabrent XTRM Q – Hooked up to TD2
Sabrent XTRM Q – Hooked up to Laptop
Besides drive performance testing I did take a look at a few other things. I was especially curious about the wired 1GbE network jack so I did our normal network testing which uses Passmark Performance Test to test from the TD2/Laptop to my PC across the network. The NIC tested at 841.8 Mbps which is a little slower than an onboard NIC for a motherboard but significantly faster than you can expect over wireless. I was curious though if accessing files over the hard drives would slow things down so I tested that as well by running CrystalDiskMark at the same time as the test. It did slow things down, but only by 67 Mbps which is hardly anything.
Network test |
Full Speed |
With Crystal Disk Mark running |
Terra Master TD2 Thunderbolt3 Plus |
841.8 Mbps |
774.6 Mbps |
I also confirmed that the passthrough charging works well. I think it charges faster than the power supply included with my Razer Blade Stealth which is possible with the TD2 having a 90 watt PSU and the Blade Stealth having a 65 watt PSU. I hooked it up to my Type-C meter as well during a bootup (with a full battery sadly) and did see 19.5v which matches up with the 20v needed and 2.4 amps which calculates out to 47 watts at the time.
The fan at the back of the TD2 does put out a consistent noise which I tested to be 33.3 decibels. This was a lot quieter than the fan on my laptop, but if you are noise aware like I am it is something to keep in mind as well. That said it is a standard 80mm x 25mm thick fan and has a normal fan header so replacement with a quieter model is always possible in the future as well and with just four screws to gain access it isn’t hard to do.