USB Flash Drives – Power Consumption Measurement using Plugable’s USBC-TKEY

The power consumed by USB peripherals such as flash drives has typically not been much of a concern. 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 bus-powered devices is arguably more important compared to the performance numbers in such cases. 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. While there are plenty of inline USB power measurement gadgets, they are not suited for the upcoming Type-C / USB 3.1 ecosystem. Fortunately, Plugable's USBC-TKEY USB 3.1 Type-C power delivery sniffer came to our rescue. Read on for the details of how we utilized Plugable's USBC-TKEY to measure the power consumed by bus-powered USB peripherals.