SilverStone TS12C Dual Drive Docking Station Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer:SilverStone Technology Co. Ltd.
Product Name: Dual 2.5″ or 3.5″ Drive Docking Station
Model Number: TS12C
UPC: 84476114063
Price As Tested: $99.23 (Newegg | Amazon)

Full Disclosure: SilverStone supplied the product sample used in this article.

A docking station provides a quick and easy way to connect bare drive mechanisms to a computer, and is an essential part of any enthusiasts’ tool kit. For backup or simply data transfer, the ability to easily connect to a bare drive mechanism is very useful. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests SSD performance with SilverStone’s new TS12C Dual Drive Docking Station, which brings dual drive support, offline drive cloning, and USB 3.1 Gen 2 SuperSpeed+ connectivity to the party.

With the increasing prevalence of SATA SSDs in enthusiast systems, it’s nice to see an external drive dock supporting the full 10Gb/s speed of USB 3.1 Gen 2 Superspeed+.

Data Transfer Rate	10GB/s (on USB 3.1 Gen 2 port)
Drive Interface Support	SATA 1/2/3
Weight	480g
Dimensions	140mm (W) x 70mm (H) x 126mm (D) (without feet) 5.51″ (W) x 2.76 (H) x 4.96″ (D) (without feet)

Let’s take a look at this dock in the next section.

• Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX Z270-i Socket LGA 1151
• Processor: 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7-78700K Kaby Lake CPU
• System Memory: 16GB DDR4 2133MHz
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

For this test, I used a freshly-erased Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD. I ran tests both with the drive connected to a native SATA III port on the test system, as well as with the drive in the dock, connected to the motherboard’s Type C port. Finally, although SilverStone does not include a Type A adapter cable, I tested with a self-supplied Type A cable plugged into a standard USB 3 port (5Gb/s).

First, let’s look at AIDA 64 sequential read speeds: I love the smooth performance of modern SSDs. Here we see the 850 EVO, when connected to the motherboard’s native SATA port, turning in an average sequential read speed of just over 516 megabytes per second.

Next, I put the SSD in the TS12C dock and ran the test again. As you might expect, the results were virtually identical.

Last, let’s connect the dock to a standard USB 3 Type A port (5Gb/s). Again, SilverStone does not supply a USB A to USB C adapter cable, but it works fine anyway.

Here we see that the performance of the 850 is slightly throttled by the slower USB 3 port, with the average linear read speed dropping 15% from 517.3MB/s to 440.5MB/s.

So it’s clear that the drive’s linear performance isn’t constrained by a USB C Gen 2 port, but is somewhat affected by the slower USB 3 port.

But the overall performance picture is not that simple. Let’s try hitting the drive with a lot of requests in IOMeter:

With our standard workload of 4K random reads and writes at a queue depth of 32, the 850 EVO, when connected to a native SATA port, turns in an excellent score of over 83,000 IOPS. However, things are dramatically different when the drive is tested while in the TS12C Dual Drive Dock:

The total IOPS drop by over 42% to 48,247, while total megabytes per second drops by a similar percentage, from 341 to 197 MB/s. Average response time has doubled, although the maximum response time is pretty much the same. Now let’s look at the IOMeter performance on a USB 3 port:

There’s basically no change in IOMeter scores when the dock is connected to a 5Gb/s USB 3 port as opposed to a 10Gb/s USB C port. (The CPU utilization initially seems much larger, but that’s a result of IOMeter scaling the graph. CPU utilization is actually down slightly.)

The dramatic drop in IOMeter scores when the Samsung 850 EVO is in the dock as opposed to being connected to a native SATA port doesn’t mean there’s some sort of problem with the TS12C; it means is that the AHCI protocol used on SATA ports is much better designed for heavy I/O loads than is the USB mass storage protocol, even when the latter is bolstered by USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) as the TS12C is.

But as we’ll see in the next section, the SilverStone dock has another trick up its sleeve: CLONING.

A fascinating feature of this dock that I haven’t seen elsewhere is the ability to make a block-for-block duplicate of a drive to another drive that’s the same size or larger. The dock doesn’t have to be connected to a computer for this functionality, either. There are just three steps to take:

1. Insert the source drive in the HDD 1 slot and the destination drive in the HDD 2 slot.
2. Press and hold the Mode button until the power indicator light changes from blue to red (about 3 seconds)
3. Press the Start button.

You should make certain you have the drives in the correct slots (source drive in the rear, destination drive in the front) as pressing the Start button will begin the operation instantly. Four indicator LEDs, labeled “25%”, “50%”, “75%”, and “100%” give a rough idea of the progress of the cloning operation. I tested this function by cloning a 1TB Crucial SSD with multiple partitions and a specially configured EFI partition to boot on my Hackintosh to the Samsung 850 EVO I used for the AIDA tests. The clone operation took just under an hour and the cloned drive booted perfectly on my Hackintosh, with all data intact.

You might argue that the lack of read-after-write verification makes this feature unsuitable for enterprise environments, but it’s sure handy at the consumer level!

In the last section I’ll give my final thoughts and conclusion on the SilverStone TS12C.

A drive dock is a very utilitarian piece of hardware, and I’ve had many over the years. Aside from a brief flirtation with eSATA connectivity, the most consequential change in dock capability has been the switch to USB 3. Now, the SilverStone TS12C ups the ante by jumping to USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+, and adding the ability to duplicate a drive offline.

If, like most people, you use an external drive dock for backups and data transfer, the SilverStone TS12C will give you the best possible performance if you’re using SSDs (there’s no performance advantage over standard USB 3 docks if you’re using mechanical hard disks). USB protocol limitations will hinder random performance, but pure data transfer will run as fast as it would with the drive connected directly to a SATA port, and that’s very nice. The drive duplication feature is handy, too: I never knew anyone who ever said that they wish they didn’t have so many backups.

I have only two complaints about this product:

1. SilverStone should include both a longer USB C cable as well as a USB C to USB A adapter.
2. The JBOD functionality touted on the box doesn’t seem to exist.

This last point is weird. The ASM1352R chip this dock is based on supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD (drive spanning), and is in fact used in the MyDigitalSSD BOOST external drive, which Benchmark Reviews looked at here, to seamlessly meld two mSATA drives into a single volume. Theoretically I should have been able to make the two 1TB SSD drives I used for testing look like a single 2TB volume but I couldn’t see any way to do this. It’s certainly not addressed in the manual.

The SilverStone TS12C Dual Drive Docking Station spices up the external drive dock category by adding 10Gb/s USB C 3.1 Gen 2 support as well as a very handy offline drive cloning mode. The only real downside is the price: $99.23 (Newegg | Amazon) is more than double the price of most dual-drive USB 3 external docks. In my opinion, the metal construction, USB C support, and drive cloning capabilities justify this price premium. I just wish the included USB C cable was a bit longer, and that SilverStone would include a USB A cable as a fallback.

The (linear read/write) performance of the dock was excellent. However, USB protocols hinder random and high queue depth workload performance on any dock, including this one.

Appearance-wise, SilverStone’s wrapped the black plastic dock in an attractive matte aluminum sleeve. This adds to the overall feeling of construction quality,

Functionally, the dock does everything you’d want, probably faster than you’d expect, and tops it off with the offline cloning feature.

As for value: well, as noted above, it’s a pretty expensive dock. But the TS12C is easily worth the price if you’ll be using SSDs and the cloning feature.

+ Full speed data transfer for SSDs
+ Offline drive cloning feature
+ Metal construction

– JBOD functionality appears absent
– No USB-A cable included
– Eye Strain-inducing manual

• Performance: 9.75
• Appearance: 9.50
• Construction: 9.50
• Functionality: 9.75
• Value: 8.75

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.