Enforcing a Standard

The Samsung T5 is a beast. 2TB in a matchbox. And you can fill it i about 2 hours. This relationship does not sound shocking, as there were times in history of computing when you were able to fill a hard drive in 2 hours. It does not until you realize how much 2TB is. It is 250 DVDs. It takes 10 seconds to back up a dual layer DVD with this drive, or around 1.5 second for a CD. It maintains continuous write throughput north of 400 MB/s.

The only thing I don't quite like is the drive's form factor. It requires a cable and the cable supplied by Samsung is bulky - bigger than the drive itself. But USB cables are universal and it is a piece of cake to find a slimmer alternative, right?

Wrong!

Expecting some issues I ordered three different USB 3.1 A - to - Type-C SuperSpeed cables on Amazon. They arrived yesterday and I found them all not working as expected. While slimmer and nicer than the original one, and while the T5 never reported any errors, the transfer speed dropped by an order of magnitude - below 40 MB/s.

Of course when connected with a 3rd party cable the drive falls back to the USB 2.0 mode and all the benefits of fast transfer disappear. Worse - it does that without any warning. It works, but is very (for today's standards) slow.

The thing is how do I make sure now the next cable I'm buying will deliver the expected transfer rate? This is the problem I have as an end user. The USB-IF is facing a bigger problem: how to make sure end users are not disappointed?

Enforcing a standard is a tough problem. Testing and qualification is one thing. The other thing is how do you market the products that pass the tests to end users? Shopping on Amazon I noticed some cables have a little "SS10" markings on them, but hey, is that enough?

Maybe, for such new standards, their qualification bodies should be doing what Apple has been doing for their proprietary lighting cables: implement a secure, hardware based authentication for products that pass qualification. And make sure non authorized products are not accepted by devices. If a cable offered via Amazon would not work at all displaying a clear message to an end user, Amazon would stop offering it and drop from the catalog. I think this would increase the user satisfaction, as has been clearly recognized by Apple.