However, it has additional capabilities such as the monitoring of the VBUS and VCONN voltages and currents, injecting power delivery packets on the CC1 and CC2 pins and placing Rd/Rp/Ra resistors on CC1 and CC2. The Twinkie / USBC-TKEY is primarily intended for developers to monitor the power delivery traffic between two USB Type-C devices. Google doesn't sell Twinkie directly to end-users, but interested consumers can get the version manufactured by Plugable - the USB 3.1 Type-C Power Delivery Sniffer ( USBC-TKEY).īuy Plugable USB 3.1 Type-C (USB-C) Power Delivery Sniffer on The Chromium Twinkie USB-PD Sniffer is one of the most famous Type-C diagnostic kits, thanks to its use by Benson Leung in evaluating adherence of various Type-C cables and adapters to the specifications. There are plenty of other inline USB power measurement gadgets, but none of them are suitable for Type-C / USB 3.1 ports. Devices such as PortPilot offer a professional alternative for inline power measurement while adding management and diagnostic features. The measurement of the power consumed by USB peripherals is conceptually a simple affair.

In the final section, we look at some results from our evaluation of the power consumption of different flash drives followed by some concluding remarks. This is followed by a detailed description of our hardware setup and the software infrastructure to gather the required data. This article deals with some background on inline USB power measurement and our available options. A reader comment in our recent review of the Samsung Portable SSD T3 piqued our interest, and we set out to quantitatively measure this aspect. The power consumed by bus-powered devices is arguably more important compared to the performance numbers in such cases. However, with OTG support on the rise, mounting external storage via USB on mobile devices has become a common use-case. The power consumed by USB peripherals such as flash drives has typically not been much of a concern.

Flash drives usb 2 vs usb 3