Vantec Nexstar 3.5" external HDD enclosure: mobility in style.
Vantec Thermal technologies is an internationally operating company that was established in 1994. Among other products the company develops and sells cooling products for notebooks, cards readers, hubs, case modding stuff, PSUs and external storage enclosures. If you would like to know more about the company you can find them online at www.vantectw.com
I would like to thank Vantec and www.dollarshops.eu for providing me with this review sample. Dollarshops is one the best online hardware stores I’ve ever done business with. They always delivered on time and have decent pricing, A++.
The product
In this review I will be taking a look at the NST-360SU-BK made by Vantec. This product is an external housing for 3.5” hard disks and it has support for USB 2 and eSATA. In the US it can be bought for around $35 from many of the popular online stores including Newegg. In the Netherlands the availability of this product is also very good.
These are the official specifications according to the manufacturer:
Model: NST-360SU-BK
Interface: SATA to eSATA & USB 2.0
Dimension: 206 X 123 X 33mm
Supports: Window 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP Mac OS 8.6 & Above
Packaging and first impressions
The product is well packed in a ridged box in which the delicate parts like the eSATA bracket and power adapter are well packed to prevent damage during transport. The overall quality and care with which this product is packed is excellent.
In the box you will find the following parts:
- driver disc and user manual
- 3.5" SATA HDD enclosure, power adaptor
- power cable, eSATA cable, USB cable
- SATA to eSATA bracket
- vertical stand
- 6 screws (for securing the hard disk inside the enclosure)
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The box comes with everything you will need.
A Closer look at the physical properties of the product
The main part of the enclosure is made from black aluminum polished to a mirror finish. The chrome decorative highlights and the vertical stand are made from plastic but don’t feel or look cheap.
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Nice and shiny indeed :)
While handling this enclosure I immediately noticed greasy fingerprints are left behind on the metal casing. This is normal because the casing is black and shiny, but it is something to keep in mind when you are interested in this product. In case you really hate dust or fingerprints then the blue or red models from Vantec may be a better option for you.
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Here you see the power adapter and from left to right: USB cable, eSATA bracket, SATA cable.
I like the fact that the adapter and power plug are build in one piece. A separately cased power adapter -like those used on the Western Digital external hard disks- aren’t very handy to carry around, so this solution is a relief. I do hope that in future products they manage to build the adapter into the enclosure itself.
The eSATA bracket is installed by screwing it in (like a PCI card bracket) and plugging-in the SATA cable to one of the internal SATA connectors. As you can see in the picture this bracket provides a data cable connection only, so you will always have to use the included adapter to power your drive. Although this is a small draw-back I don’t really care about it. In most cases users will always want to have the adapter with them as it is required for operating the drive using a USB connection.
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The Nexstar 3 enclosure is pretty small. Only the length of the device could have been made a little bit shorter while still physically being able to contain a 3.5” disk. Nothing to complain here.
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A front view of the enclosure, it is relatively thin
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The side of the enclosure can be pulled out which requires some pulling force. For optimal security you can screw the casing shut with two provided screws.
In the picture you can see a small cable which is plugged into a small connector at the PCB. This small cable needs to be pulled from the connector when you install a disk. The purpose of this cable is to provide electricity to a blue power LED light at the front of the case.
The long black connector in the picture is a SATA data and power connector in one. You insert it into the disk by pushing the disk towards it. The grey painted metal part that you see in this picture slides into two rails on the inside of the casing.
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The disk tray in its entirety shot from the back side
The disk is secured with the other 4 of the included 6 screws. The disk used in this test is a Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB, which is one of the most popular hard disk at the time of writing this review. It runs a little hotter than some of my older Western Digital drives making it suitable for testing the thermal properties of this enclosure.
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From left to right: power switch, power connector, USB connector, SATA connector, “copy” button.
I am interested in what this copy button can be used for exactly. Later in this review I will shed some light on what this button does.
Test methodology and hardware used
The way to properly test this enclosure is to read from and write to it using the USB 2 interface, the eSATA interface and testing the disk internally using the regular SATA interface. I will also do some copy testing as in a real world scenario people may want to merge or divide data from or to different folders on the disk.
In this test I will use a foldercontaining 6769MB of data. In this map there are common file types stored like files with the following extensions: .avi, .mp3, .rar, .exe, .iso, .jpg, etc. The map contains 270 files divided over 28 folders. I will measure how long it takes for copy, read and write operations to complete and take an average per second.
For synthetic read testing I will use HD Tune 3.0 professional. I won't do write tests using this program as it requires an empty disk. My Samsung has 100GB of data stored on it that I can't store anywhere else. The fact that the first 100GB on the disk are already full of data is important as it will somewhat effect the read and write tests using the 7GB map. I think using an empty disk would be an unrealistic scenario, so I'm glad I had some data to (partly) fill it up.
The test system:
Intel E6600 C2D at 3.6GHz
4x1GB DDR2-1000 5-5-5-12
Gigabyte P35-DS4
Nvidia 8800GT 512MB
Tagan 480W PSU
Hard disk drives used in the test:
Samsung Spinpoint T166, 500GB, 16MB cache memory (main test disk drive)
Western Digital WD1600YS, 160GB, 8MB cache memory (main system drive containing OS)
Western Digital My Book 250GB, 8MB cache memory (external USB disk drive)
OS: Windows XP 32bit
Apart from the the Western Digital My Book hard drive both other drives were defragmented before running the tests. After every single test the system was rebooted. I did this to eliminate a "memory effect" from hard drive caching. I ran every test twice (with an intermediate reboot) to ensure integrity of the obtained test data. I found the test data obtained to be very consistent, so it can be considered valid.
