Silicon Power Thunder T11 review: Fast speed stunted by extreme heat

Tiny, lightweight, bus-powered, and fast, the Silicon Power Thunder T11 appears at first glance to be the ideal portable storage device for Thunderbolt Mac users.

6.7

Silicon Power Thunder T11

The Good

The <b>Silicon Power Thunder T11</b> is tiny, very light and very fast when first plugged in. The drive is bus-powered and comes included with a short Thunderbolt cable.

The Bad

The drive runs extremely hot, and its performance drops as its temperature rises. There's no support for USB 3.0, and its capacity caps at only 120GB.

The Bottom Line

Excessive heat and degraded performance make the Silicon Power Thunder T11 appropriate only for casual Mac users.

Plug it in, though, and it tells a different tale. In my testing, the drive runs very hot after only 10 to 15 minutes of use, and as its temperature rises, its performance drops dramatically. On top of that, the drive supports only Thunderbolt, and storage is capped at just 120GB.

That makes the new Thunder T11 suitable only for casual users who need to quickly copy data to share between computers, not as a backup drive. Make sure you consider that before spending $230 to buy one. For cooler choices in the portable drive sector, check out this list.

Palm size, bus-powered design

The Thunder T11 is easily the most compact Thunderbolt portable drive I've seen. The drive fits easily in my palm and weighs mere 2.2 ounces.

On one side, it comes with a Thunderbolt port and a small LED light that flashes blue when it's saving or reading data. The drive includes a short Thunderbolt cable, which is great since you don't want to use it with a standard Thunderbolt cable that's more than 6 feet long. Considering the size of the drive, however, I wish it came with a built-in Thunderbolt connector instead, similar to the case of USB thumb drives.

Out of the box, the drive is preformatted in HFS+ and works right away with a Mac. It doesn't require a separate power adapter as the Thunderbolt cable takes care of both data and power at the same time. Since it has only one Thunderbolt port -- not unusual for a portable drive -- in a daisy-chain setup, you can only use it at the end of the chain. (You can usually connect as many as seven Thunderbolt devices together.) The drive is also compatible with Thunderbolt 2 port with no change in performance.

What's with the heat?

The Thunder has an aluminum chassis that also works as the heat-sink to dissipate the heat generated by the internal solid-state storage chips. And it can get very hot. During my testing, after about 10 or 15 minutes of operation, it became hot enough that I couldn't rest my finger on it for more than a few seconds, and after 30 minutes I didn't want to touch it at all with my bare hand.

It's quite normal for portable drive to get slightly hot, but I found the case of the Thunder T11 rather extreme. The drive does cool down fast, however, when unplugged or when the host computer goes into sleep mode. It shares its power status with the host computer.

Fast but inconsistent performance

I was a little troubled by the Thunder's performance. On one hand, it was very fast, offering the sustained write speed of some 180MBps and a read speed of 230MBps.

But I could only achieve that performance during the first 10 or 15 minutes of use, while the drive was still cool. Once it became hot, its performance degraded dramatically; at one point, down to just about 60MBps.

That said, the scores on the charts represent the best-case scenario, which is what you'd get when you first plug the drive into a computer to quickly copy some data. To the drive's credit, with its speed, you can actually move a lot of data around within the first just 10 minutes, easily around 100GB, which is more than you need in most cases. For prolonged usage, such as backing up or video editing, expect much lower performance.

Other than the heat issue, the Thunder worked fine in my testing, and it was very quiet.

Conclusion

The Thunder T11 has a lot going for it, including its fast performance and its tiny physical size. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to recommend it due to the extreme amount of heat it generates during extended operation. It still makes a great drive if you just want to move data between different computers, but for heavy usage, you'd be better off with something that's bigger and much cooler, such as the new WD My Passport Pro .