Review

The hub is packaged in a simple cardboard box, but centered, making damage from shipping unlikely. It includes a short USBC to USBC cable, a large thermal pad, rubber retainers for the SSD and basic instruction manual.

You can open the device tool-free by pressing on the plasic retainer on one side and pulling out the carrier sled. The SSD is installed as usual, but held in place only by tiny and rather loose rubber retainers. It works okey, but I'm not a fan. Afterwards the thermal pad is laid on top of the SSD to transfer heat to the case. Which works, but only partially, because it is not clamped and doesn't make good contact.

The PCB itself it clipped into the plastic sled. There are mounting holes, but the screws are missing, s it's a bit rattly without the SSD and thermal pad.

Testing

Setup

For testing I used this hub with two devices: a Laptop with Windows 10 and a S10 with LineageOS Android 12. For testing power delivery I used chargers suitable for either device.

Cable

The included USB cable works in both directions, on both ends, with full speed. The following tests prove it is a proper USB GEN2x2 cable with two high speed lanes. I've also tested other GEN2x2 cables I had on hand, which worked as well, so I assume the port is implemented according to the standard.

USB3

The two USB3 ports work as expected without issues on both devices. I don't have a suitable device to saturate bandwith, but my fastest USB3 Flash drive archived the same 350MB/s as it does with a native USB3 port.

M.2 NVME

For all tests I installed my only spare M.2 SSD, a DRAM-less 512GB PCIe GEn3x2 model. I've benchmarked it previously for >1GB/s installed in a native M.2 slot, so it will be sufficient for this test.

During my testing I noticed that sometimes the drive connects as a USB2 device and is restricted to 40MB/s bandwidth. I could not track down this issue, but it seems like the occurrence frequency changes with hosts, cables and cable orientation. Weird.

If it does connect as a USB3 device, the connection is reliable and fast. Test result with CrystalDiskMark:

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 x64 (C) 2007-2021 hiyohiyo

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
  SEQ    1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):   832.913 MB/s [    794.3 IOPS] < 10046.59 us>
  SEQ    1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   631.491 MB/s [    602.2 IOPS] <  1657.60 us>
  RND    4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1):   105.426 MB/s [  25738.8 IOPS] <  1242.19 us>
  RND    4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):    20.980 MB/s [   5122.1 IOPS] <   194.95 us>

[Write]
  SEQ    1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):   744.835 MB/s [    710.3 IOPS] < 11224.31 us>
  SEQ    1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   340.828 MB/s [    325.0 IOPS] <  3070.68 us>
  RND    4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1):   103.811 MB/s [  25344.5 IOPS] <  1260.54 us>
  RND    4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):    39.747 MB/s [   9703.9 IOPS] <   102.78 us>

Profile: Default
   Test: 1 GiB (x1) [E: 0% (0/477GiB)]
   Mode: [Admin]
   Time: Measure 5 sec / Interval 5 sec 
   Date: 2023/03/05 
     OS: Windows 10 (x64)

Ethernet

The USB to Ethernet converter is correctly detected on both the laptop and the phone. Surprisingly, I only could get internet access on my phone (yes, WiFi and LTE was off), where it worked after about a minute without further configuration. On the PC it showed up with all the details in the device manager, and reinstalling drivers didn't fix it. I didn't care enough to figure out what the issue was and rather blame it on windows. I did not test the speed at all.

HDMI

While USBC can theoretically handle HDMI directly, but it does take up all the lanes so it's never used in practice. Instead this hub uses a PD to HDMI converter like every other USBC video adapter.

On the laptop it worked out of the box without any issues and without installing any drivers. I used it with a 4k display, where it is limited to 30fps because of the limited bandwidth of the single DP lane. At lower resolutions the same bandwidth can deliver higher refresh rates, 2k 60ps and full HD 240fps should be possible as well, although I tested neither.

Surprisingly the phone HW can provide a DP output as well, even at 4k, but the software support isn't great. By default the screen is mirrored, but because resolution is wider than a normal display it is squished and you loose the crispness. In the developer options you can also enable an experimental desktop mode. It does work somewhat, but there are a lot of bugs including some flickering on both the display and the screen, which makes it practically unusable.

Power Delivery

The hub does forward the Power Delivery request from the host device to the attached charger. It supports both 9V and 20V with no problem, but I could only test up to 65W, this is the maximum my laptop will accept.

Unfortunately the hub can not request a higher voltage on it's own and regulate it down to whatever the host requests. This means in some cases you can be power limited, eg. if a 5V device draws 2.5A, only 5V 0.5A (=2.5W) are left over for the hub and the SSD.

It is also possible that the host powers the hub, if it can suppy enough power. The phone can supply roughly 5V 0.5A (=2.5W), the laptop about 5V 3A (=15W). Unsurprisingly the phone can't access the SSD, and the hub power cycles instead. I did work without issues from the PC. Most hosts including my devices can't supply a higher voltage, including mine, so I couldn't test it.

I only measured idle power, and got around 1.5W with a DRAM-less SSD and 1.0W without it. Dynamic power is harder to measure and heavily depends on the SSD you use. I've seen SSD rated as high as 3V3 3A, or about 10W. Assuming conversion efficiency of 85%, if would pull about 11.8W from the power supply in addition to the increased power consumption of the chips. Or, to put it in another way, you should use a 80W+ charger, even if your laptop only accepts 65W max.

Teardown

The PCB is held in the sled with plastic clips and the connectors themselfs. A bit of force is required to get the board out.

I've taken high resolution macro pictures of the top and bottom side of the PCB, and separate pictures for all major integrated circuits to capture their part numbers. Whenever possible I also provided the datasheet for each IC, or any other relevant information I could find.

The PCB is a 4 layer design, meaning you can't trace out the connections from the pictures alone. Top and bottom copper flood are GND, and to match impedance for the differential pairs the internal layers must be mostly GND as well.

Both the M.2 and Ethernet controller are connected internally to a 4 port hub, the remaining two ports are the user accessible ones. All devises support USB3.1 Gen2, meaning the maximum individual and total bandwidth is 10Gb/s. If you connect other USB3 devices bandwidth will be shared, however the USB2 signals independent and will not impact performance.

On the USBC port there is a dedicated switch IC to compensate for cable rotation. It's a rather expensive chip, but mandatory for detachable cables. Interestingly all differential pairs are AC coupled, according to speck only the TX pins have to, but I assume they have done this for additional protection. The second DP port lane pair as well as the SBU pins remain unconnected.

On the board there are multiple SOIC-8 packages, these are SPI flash memory chips with 4Mbit each. They contain code or settings for the ICs they are connected to, and could be read out with an Arduino or similar. I don't have a need for this and thus didn't bother.

At last I want to mention the multiple DCDC step down voltage converters. I couldn't find any information on largest one on the top side, but I deduct that it converts the up to 20V to a local 5V for the system and other regulators. There are multiple 1A regulators to power the various ICs, and one additional 2A regulator to power the SSD. This is theoretically not enough to satisfy the rated current of some SSDs, however I think it can handle short bursts fine. I would not suggest to use a SSD with high power requirements for continuous workloads, as it may thermally stress the regulator and cause it to fail.

Summary

If you want a compact, feature packed USBC hub with an NVME slot, this is probably the right device for you. There are no "filler" ports like VGA and card readers that take up space, and every port you do get works at its maximum speed. It it reasonable well engineered and they didn't cut corners on things like the cable rotation detection.

The one thing I really didn't like it the NVME chip connecting randomly in USB2 mode. There is no indication besides bad transfer speeds, and you have to reconnect in an attempt fo fix this. Power delivery isn't perfect either, but only a few edge use cases will be affected.