Performance USB3 and power consumption

Power Consumption

Okay, we're back to some generic stuff. We look at power consumption among others. It's a hot topic these days and, well, we measure in a 10M distance setup. We measure this at wall socket side with the help of a power monitor which can measure to a tenth of a Watt precision. This device measures in-between the wall socket and router. 

Above, power consumption, in IDLE, the router uses give or take 8 Watts continuously. With activity, the number sticks at roughly 10 Watts for the router. I also added the power consumption numbers for the SX10 10 Gbit switch, which uses roughly 11 Watts. The EX8000 range extender uses only 6 watts, which we find very acceptable.

USB3 Performance

With the help of USB 3.0 you get fast storage on the router. Since the router allows you to share the files on external storage, the router basically functions as a NAS. Handy for UPnP needs and such. So we figured it would be nice to observe how fast USB 3.0 is on these routers:

The performance is pretty good. The test involves nothing other than copying from and to the USB device. When coupled with a portable USB drive connected to its USB 3.0 port, the router shows a sustained WRITE speed of ~44 MB/s and it reached just over 72 MB/sec READ performance. Plenty enough for any UPnP streaming ;)