Satechi DotDisk SSD enclosure review: Svelte, fan-cooled 80Gbps storage | usagoldmines.com

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Super portable for 80Gbps
• Fan-cooled
• Easy to populate
• Thunderbolt 5 cable (works with USB)

Cons

• Pricey like all 80Gbps enclosures
• Runs quite warm despite the fan

Our Verdict

Despite its diminutive size, you never need to worry about thermal throttling with the handsome Satechi DotDisk 80Gbps enclosure thanks to an internal fan. But it’s pricey — as are all 80Gbps enclosures.

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Price When Reviewed

$200

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$199.99

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Setachi’s DotDisk is an 80Gbps SSD enclosure that will accommodate a single NVMe SSD. It’s uniquely portable, as it employs active cooling in the form of a small fan rather than the bulky passive cooling fins most 80Gbps enclosures feature.

Yet, despite its svelte profile, the DotDisk proved a top-flight performer. I like the performance, the size, and the look.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparison.

What are the Setachi DotDisk’s features?

As discussed, the pewter- or silver-colored, all-aluminum DotDisk is rather tiny for a high-speed enclosure. It measures a mere 3.9-inches long, by 1.4-inches wide, by 0.7-inches thick and weighs just shy of 4 ounces when populated.

Those dimensions make it far easier to transport than most 80Gbps (and even 40Gbps) enclosures, but also mean it has less surface area to shed heat. That did come into play with some older, less energy efficient SSDs, despite the small 1-inch fan located on the bottom of the PC board.

The Satechi ships with a 12-inch Thunderbolt 5 cable — which I truly appreciate. I’ve experienced too many issues with cheaper USB4/120Gbps cables recently to trust them. I’ve never had a problem with a Thunderbolt cable in well over a decade. Most likely due to a very strict certification process.

Access to the interior is gained via a single, rather tiny non-captive screw. Be careful, it’s very easy to drop despite the magnetic screwdriver included in the package. Both the internal and external screws are pentagonal, so use (and don’t lose) the provided tool.

One exceedingly minor gripe: The instructions inside the box (nicely printed on the tray holding the drive where you’ll spot them immediately) say that you remove the internal screw from the captive mounting nut. There wasn’t one.

There were, however, two (one spare) inside the package also containing the thermal strip, as well as a spare for the screw securing the lid. As I’ve sent more than one tiny screw skittering across my hardwood floor, only to be found later with the vacuum cleaner, I appreciate spares.

How much is the Satechi DotDisk?

The DotDisk is financially on par with other 80Gbps enclosures at $200 retail. By way of comparison, the OWC 1M2 80Gbps retails for $220, and the Terramaster D1 SSD Pro for $250. There are discounts available for those latter two (they’ve been available quite a bit longer) that close the gap, but the DotDisk is priced as it should be. At least with respect to the current 80Gbps market.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t inform you that 40Gbps enclosures are about half the price of the 80Gbps variety, still pretty darn fast, and to us, the sweet spot in the price/performance ratio. 40Gbps SSDs are twice as fast as 20Gbps SSDs, which are in turn, twice as fast as 10Gbps SSDs. However, 80Gbps SSDs are only approximately 50 percent faster (6GBps versus 4GBps) than 40Gbps models.

(10Gbps enclosures are by far the cheapest external solution and will still fulfill most missions. 20Gbps are decently affordable as well, but function at only 10Gbps unless you have a USB3.2×2 port. That includes when attached to most Thunderbolt ports.)

How does the Satechi DotDisk perform?

In terms of speed, the DotDisk left absolutely nothing to be desired. With a 2TB Crucial T710 PCIe 5.0 SSD inside, it cruised to the numbers you see below. Sweet. But take these numbers with a small grain of salt — the T710 is a very fast SSD.

That said, the DotDisk proved an extremely adept reader with large sequential files.

While still very fast with smaller files, the DotDisk/Crucial T710 combo was outpaced by the OWC 1M2 80Gbps with its Aura Ultra IV SSD in the CrystalDiskMark 8 32-queue 4K tests. Note that Windows does not currently use multiple queues.

Our real-world 48GB transfers showed that the synthetic benchmarks weren’t flukes, though the DotDisk was still outpaced by the OWC 1M2 80Gbps and — surprisingly, given its other not-always-stellar-for-80Gbps results — the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5.

The Satechi DotDisk was right on target with the 450GB write, albeit a tad slower than the TerraMaster D1 SSD Pro and OWC 1M2 80Gbps.

Note that you’ll see roughly the same performance for fewer Franklins with a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD inside the DotDisk. Or any other 80Gbps enclosure for that matter. Many PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs are capable of 7GBps to 8GBps throughput, which is faster than the USB4/Thunderbolt 5 bus seems capable of delivering.

The DotDisk enclosure runs pretty warm despite the fan, which you can hear quite clearly when the drive is being stressed. But the experience was also variable depending to the SSD inside. An older TeamGroup GE Pro ran considerably hotter than the Crucial T710. I suppose there’s something to SSD vendors’ claims about lower power usage for newer designs, after all.

Not that I expect the DotDisk’s fan to fail, but the possibility of such is the reason many 80Gbps enclosures such as Terramaster’s D1 series and OWC 1M2’s choose passive cooling via massive fins. The downside to these considerably larger designs is that they also need a lot of space around them for convection.

I will confess that I tend to stay with 10Gbps/20Gbps external SSDs for most applications — they produce far less heat and consume less energy.

Energy and heat aside, the DotDisk is an excellent performer that never throttled during multiple test runs. Good job, Satechi!

Should you buy the Satechi DotDisk?

If you want 80Gbps speed that fits easily in your pocket (who doesn’t?), the DotDisk is the way to go. It’s the most portable USB4/Thunderbolt 5 option I’ve tested — by a lot.

But if portability isn’t a concern, a passively cooled solution could be the safer option for continual, set-it-and-forget-it use.

If you’re wondering which SSD you should populate the DotDisk with, read our internal SSD roundup.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of memory total).

10Gbps, 20Gbps USB, and Thunderbolt 5/USB4 are integrated into the motherboard. Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we report only the first) to find the storage device’s potential performance. Then we run a series of 48GB transfer and 450GB write tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose.

Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.