Asus PA40SU 40Gbps SSD enclosure evaluation: Simple set up, good-looking, quick

Finest Costs At present: Asus ProArt PA40SU USB4 NVMe enclosure

Asus’s ProArt PA40SU is among the best USB4 NVMe enclosures we’ve examined, with a glossy steel design and aggressive 40Gbps efficiency. However regardless of its built-in fan, it might nonetheless get uncomfortably heat below sustained transfers.

Learn on to be taught extra, then see our roundup of the very best exterior drives for comparability.

What are the Asus PA40SU’s options?

The PA40SU is a good-looking, largely steel black rectangle measuring roughly 4.75 inches lengthy, by 1.8 inches huge, by 0.6 inches thick. Weight is round 4.7 ounces with an SSD inside. It’s svelte certainly for a 40Gbps SSD enclosure — witness the massive fins and bulk of the competing OWC 1M2 and TerraMaster D1 Plus.

The enclosure is slotted on either side to facilitate air movement, and is actively cooled by a fan on the non-port finish. The fan is the rationale it’s not as cumbersome because the aforementioned competitors. The NVMe bridge/controller chip is an ASMedia ASM2464PD, and no AC adapter is required — the PA40SU runs solely off of bus energy as all single-SSD enclosures do.

The PA40SU’s neatest trick is that it’s fully tool-less. You possibly can entry the drive bay by sliding a large latch on the backplate, and the retaining mechanism for the NVMe SSD is an easy plastic clip that swivels to lock and unlock.

The retaining clip will be moved to a second location to accommodate 2230 kind issue drives. Slide it into the bigger a part of the keyhole, take away it, and reverse the method within the keyhole closest to the M.2 slot.

Proven beneath is the beefy backplate launch change in all its glory. Regardless of being simple to open, I by no means bought the impression that the unit may come aside by chance. You possibly can see the sturdy spring mechanisms that gave me that feeling within the picture above (higher left).

As talked about, the PA40SU is a USB4 40Gbps enclosure that may settle for each 2280 (22mm huge, 80mm lengthy) and 2230 (30mm lengthy) SSDs in its single M.2 slot. There’s a single Kind-C port on one finish with a tiny energy/exercise mild instantly to its proper. I discussed it’s a looker, proper?

How a lot is the Asus PA40SU?

The PA40SU was retailing on Amazon for $120 on the time of this writing. That’s roughly the going charge for a 40Gbps enclosure for the time being, although some which have been round longer may supply higher reductions. Alas, the one-year guarantee is a bit disappointing. I used to be anticipating at the least two years at this worth level.

How briskly is the PA40SU?

Whereas not the quickest 40Gbps NVMe enclosure we’ve examined, the PA40SU was aggressive with its OWC 1M2, LaCie Rugged SSD4, and TerraMaster D1 SSD Plus rivals in practically all respects. In different phrases, it’s quick, although higher on artificial benchmarks than with real-world transfers.

As you’ll be able to see beneath, the PA40SU turned in a very good CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential throughput efficiency, although it didn’t high the charts in any specific take a look at.

It was the identical neck-and-neck story with CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K exams.

The PA40SU’s 48GB transfers fell a bit behind the curve with Home windows Explorer, however rebounded properly with the extremely really useful FastCopy file-transfer utility. For those who aren’t utilizing FastCopy for giant transfers, you ought to be.

As soon as once more, the PA40SU perked up with FastCopy after a really lackluster 450GB write below Home windows Explorer.

Regardless of the lively cooling, the PA40SU ran very heat (one may say sizzling, at round 140 levels Fahrenheit) below load. I by no means observed any thermal throttling, and even a variety of fan noise for that matter. I opened the heated enclosure to see if the overly quiet fan was certainly spinning — it was. I would favor the noise of larger air movement for cooler operation. You may choose it the way in which it’s.

Be aware that one strategy to cut back what you may take into account extreme warmth is to connect any exterior SSD to a ten/5Gbps USB port. The decrease throughput works wonders thermally, to in fact, the detriment of efficiency. Think about this motion a final ditch, momentary repair.

Additionally, any PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD will provide you with mainly the efficiency we noticed. PCIe 5.0 is very large overkill.

Must you purchase the Asus PA40SU?

I just like the seems to be, I just like the efficiency, and I like how simple it’s to put in an NVMe SSD within the PA40SU. I’d choose that it run a bit cooler, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a worthy product. Go for it, however as all the time — store rigorously to get the very best bang to your buck.

How we take a look at

Drive exams presently make the most of Home windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Professional in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Extremely i5 225 feeding/fed by two Essential 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence whole).

Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Inside PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned 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 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we report solely the primary) to seek out the storage machine’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write exams utilizing Home windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations. The far sooner FastCopy (run as administrator) to indicate what’s really doable.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch exams. Previously the 48GB exams had been achieved with a RAM disk serving that goal.

Every take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Exterior drives are set to Finest Efficiency with Write Caching quite than Fast Elimination.

Be aware that in regular use, as a drive fills up, SSD efficiency might lower on account of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This difficulty has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much sooner, late-generation NAND.