Power saving

I’m planning to buy this USB-C NVMe enclosure, I just need to know its power saving behavior. I’m already using a similar enclosure of a different brand with a 2TB drive in it. It goes to sleep after some minutes of inactivity which is stupid, it gives me seconds of lag every time it wakes up when I access the drive, just to save 0.1W of idle power consumption. What’s the behavior of this Plugable enclosure?

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out to us, I am happy to help!

Our enclosure relies on the NVMe SSD to manage it’s own power states and does not provide additional power management features. There are only a few USB 3 to NVMe bridge chipsets on the market and from what I have seen none of them offer additional power management features beyond the SSD’s built-in feature set, like our adapter.

Most likely the delay is caused by a Windows setting called USB selective suspend, if this is the case it will affect our NVMe SSD enclosure just like the enclosure you currently have. This setting will normally not interfere with the enclosure when connected directly to the computer, but may cause the behavior you describe if the enclosure is connected through an external ( or internal ) USB hub, or USB docking station.

Selective suspend can be disabled through Windows Power Management settings by performing the following:

  1. Right click on the Start Menu and select “Power options” to open the “Power & Sleep” settings panel
  2. Select “Additional power settings” on the right side of the panel
  3. Under “Choose or customize a power plan” select “Change plan settings” for your currently selected power plan
  4. Select “Change advanced power settings” - This will open a new “Power Options” window
  5. Expand the panel for “USB settings” > “USB selective suspend settings”
  6. Set these options to “Disabled” if not already disabled
    I also recommend connecting the enclosure directly to the computer rather than through a USB hub or docking station just to rule out a power management setting in the external device causing reduced performance.

Please let me know if the above helps, and if not you can give our enclosure a try to see if it has improved behavior with your system.

Thank you,

Pat
Plugable Technology
support@plugable.com

Thank you for the quick and detailed reply.
Unfortunately I already tried the setting you mentioned with no effect on the enclosure’s behavior. I’m almost sure the unknown controller chip/firmware in my enclosure does the power saving and not the drive itself as the case’s steady led also goes off when it goes to sleep.

Anyways it’s good news that the Plugable enclosure does not have any power saving feature I’ll give it a try.

Which controller chip is in use in your enclosure? JMicron? ASMedia? I didn’t found it on the datasheet.

Hi,

Our enclosures are migrating from the JMicron JMS583 chipset to the Realtek RTL9210 chipset. Currently there is little difference between these chipsets except the Realtek chipset supports a feature called drive name passthrough which provides the human readable name for the SSD to the operating system while the JMicron based enclosures simply identify as a JMS583 chipset instead.

In my testing neither of these enclosures hung or failed to re-detect after extended inactivity and the power/activity LED as always on indicating the enclosure was powered. The LED flashes for activity and is on when powered.

Our enclosures are sold through Amazon which does not implement a first-in first-out system, this means they have mixed some of the Realtek and JMicron enclosures together and we cannot guarantee which enclosure will be delivered. The Realtek enclosures have already made it to some customers at this time.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions, I am happy to help!

Pat
Plugable Technology

Hello,

We’re closing this thread due to inactivity, but if you have any further questions please feel free to contact support@plugable.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Thanks,

Pat
Plugable Technologies
support@plugable.com

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