Netac WH61: Flash drive size, speed over 1 GB/s

Netac WH61 in detail

If there’s anything remarkable about the Netac W61 besides its lower price, it’s its super-small size. It’s similar in size to more powerful flash drives, which are usually significantly slower. But even with this external SSD enclosure, there’s no absolute certainty of reaching the maximum speed potential. After all, the cooling capabilities are weaker here, but sometimes they can be enough for those 1100 MB/s.

Evaluation

The inexpensive Netac WH61 case under our test conditions maintained stable performance at the limit of the supported interface (USB 3.2 gen. 2) over the long term. It should be added, however, that the Samsung 980 Pro SSD that we use for the tests has a fairly high temperature limit set. SSD models with a limit below 90°C will be worse off. Or even those that have it higher if you expose the enclosure to an environment with excessive ambient air temperature. At 30 °C, maximum performance was no longer achieved as presented in the results (at around 1080 MB/s) generated at an ambient air temperature of 21.0–21.3 °C. The cooling margin here is quite small.

The overall design of the enclosure is simpler, whether it’s the material design or also the fact that Netac didn’t use an indicator LED within the design, and the thermal pad is also a little smaller than you might expect. Despite this, heat is well dissipated into the heatsink, and we measured up to 51.1 °C on its surface. But this also means that the temperature of the SSD controller will be significantly higher, by how much we do not know. For the reason that when connected to the enclosure, the motherboard loses sight of the internal sensors.

At the low price that the Netac WH61 is being sold for, one should have reasonable expectations. For around 12 EUR, it is remarkable that NVMe SSDs are supported at all. And besides them also SATA, for which this enclosure will be optimal. That is, in terms of available cooling performance.

However, for short-term workloads or transferring smaller files (that’s when the performance of all SSDs is lower, and so is their temperature, of course), the Netac WH61 virtually regardless of the SSD used will always do a good job, even with the more powerful NVMe models. Compared to high-end flash drives, the speed should be higher most of the time. The Netac enclosure, meanwhile, is not too far behind them in size. It is superbly small and portable, for example, even in a trouser pocket.

Of the SSD enclosures tested, the Netac WH61 has the highest power consumption at the upper end of sequential write speeds so far. At idle, however, the order is reversed, and at around 3W, this enclosure’s operation is the lowest-power yet and will continue to be so compared to many competing solutions. With the Axagon EEM2-GTR the power consumption is “as much as” 5 W. While this may seem like a negligible difference, the impact on laptop battery life (with an external SSD attached) will be noticeable. Especially with the most economical models, whose power consumption is also in the order of single digits of watts.

What’s more frustrating is the relatively poor availability in stores, practically limited to the Chinese market, so most of our readers won’t get their hands on the Netac WH61 and will reach for another, similar SSD enclosure first.

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš

• Contents
• Netac WH61 in detail
• Speed tests
• Power consumption and temperature
• Evaluation