INTRODUCTION

   From professionals and enthusiasts to gamers and even every day casual users high-performance in pretty much everything in the computer industry is something everyone's looking for, to a certain extend that is. External hard drive enclosures in particular have always been under the spotlight, primarily for professionals, which is why just over a decade ago Intel "combined" forces with Apple in order to develop the fastest standard around, Thunderbolt (code named Light Peak back then). The rest as they say is history and so today most people are using the 3rd version of the Thunderbolt standard with the 4th already finalized and already released with the Maple and Goshen Ridge families (according to Intel Thunderbolt 4 is the same as USB 4.0). Today I’ll be testing one such Thunderbolt device and more specifically the upgraded version of Terra Master's award winning TD2 Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, the TD2 Thunderbolt 3 Plus.

   Founded in 2010, TerraMaster is a professional brand which focuses on storage products, including network attached storage and direct attached storage, which is sold in more than 40 countries and regions. Products of TerraMaster are mainly designed for customers such as small and medium businesses and home users. With its core competitiveness in excellent hardware design and strong software developing ability, TerraMaster aims to provide customers with excellent products that offer reliability and value. TerraMaster has focused on the development of storage technology for many years. TerraMaster continues to explore storage technology and applications, such as how to create more functionality and value to storage products and make storage application easier, more convenient, safer and faster to provide customers with a complete, reliable and trusted data storage solution.

   Since the TD2 TB3 Plus is an upgraded version of the original TD2 TB3 it's nearly identical with it so once again we find the same external enclosure made out of aluminum that features two bays/trays capable of holding both 2.5" and 3.5" drives which can be hardware configured in single, JBOD (Large), RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes (hot-swap/plug are also supported), top handle and a smart active cooling (80mm fan). Now even though the original TD2 TB3 could reach read and write speeds of 760MB/s and 390MB/s respectively the brand new TD2 TB3 Plus can go all the way up to 810MB/s and 806MB/s respectively. Still this bump in performance is clearly not enough to warrant the release of a new model so Terra Master also equipped the TD2 TB3 Plus with 2 USB 3.0 ports, RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet port and a Mini DP 1.4 port on top of the two Thunderbolt 3 ports used in the original. Now as some of you may recall the original TD2 TB3 also had a full sized DisplayPort v1.2 output which could support up to two 4k displays (Daisy Chain) or a single 5k display. Well thanks to its mini DP 1.4 port the TD2 TB3 supports either two 4K displays or a single 8K display which could come in handy for certain professionals. Time to take a closer look and see just how much different the TD2 TB3 Plus really is compared to the TD2 TB3.