Vantec Nexstar 3.5" external HDD enclosure: mobility in style.

[alexio]

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)


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.


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.


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.


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.


A front view of the enclosure, it is relatively thin


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.


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.


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.

[alexio]

Some real world test results !!!


Read, write and copy tests performed with a 6769MB folder using the Nexstar HDD enclosure

Note: Disabled write caching is the standard option for removable USB storage. If write caching is enabled you need to "safely remove the device" via a wizzard in Windows to not risk loosing your data. For eSATA write caching is enabled by default as the OS sees it as an internal drive. To see the impact of disabling wc I ran the same tests without it. As you can in the graphs the results are clearly bugged. I did a brief test on the Western Digital 160GB main system drive and the Samsung drive in SATA mode to find out what was going on here. The results I obtained were similar so I conclude that the Intel ICH9 SATA controller has some sort of bug when write caching is disabled (at least on my system). Please also note that with the read and write tests using (e)SATA the main drive and Samsung Spinpoint are very likely limiting each other and therefore the read and write numbers are so similar.

Synthetic benchmarking using HD Tune 3.0 Pro


USB without wc.


USB with wc.


eSATA without wc.


eSATA with wc.


SATA with wc.


Western Digital My Book USB, without wc.

Analysis of the obtained test data

The Nexstar 3 is performing like it should, it is a little bit faster than the older WD external drive, but the difference is so small this could be due to the fact that it has a different drive build into it. The small dips in the graph showing USB performance are nothing to worry about, they last only a few milliseconds in which the disk is caching. When running the test for the second time these dips are gone, so I am possitive they are from the disk caching.

The eSATA functionality is a must-have in my opinion as it greatly outperforms the slower USB 2.0 interface. eSATA is performaning quite well in this test and apart from burst speed it can keep-up with the normal SATA interface.

I do recommend to enable write caching when using eSATA if you are facing the same terrible read and copy speeds like I did. I suspect that with a different SATA storage controller the impact from disabling wc may be greatly reduced.

The enclusure keeps the Samsung drive below 40Cº during heavy file copying. Just the naked Samsung drive stays about 5 degrees cooler. The ambient temperature during testing was about 20Cº. A 20 degree DeltaT is a little on the high side, but it won't cause any problems unless you live in the middle of the Sahara and have no AC.

Conclusion

The Nexstar 3 3.5" external disk drive enclosure is a very nice product to have. The build quality is excellent and it performs like it should.

The pros:
+ Beautiful and stylish design
+ Build like a tank
+ Solid performer
+ eSATA is a must
+ Power adapter and power plug build in one piece, so less annoying cables
+ Included back-up software that opens at the press of a button

Neutral:
* Not the cheapest solutions, but worth the money in my opinion.
* Dust and fingerprints are quite visable on this enclosure.
* If you live in a very very hot enviroment you may be better off with an actively cooled (bigger) HDD enclosure. For everyone else the thermal performance of this drive is good enough.
* You have to manually flip the power switch to dimm the power LED after turning off the system.

The cons:
- It doesn't completely shut-down the disk drive during inactivity.

Final verdict: 8.5/10

[lowfat]

[b]
The cons:
- It doesn't completely shut-down the disk drive during inactivity.

Very nice review!

However this statement isn't entirely correct. That depends on the OS you use. If you are using Mac OS X the drive shuts down the drive when not in use for 30 minutes.

In Windows, the drive never shuts off.

[alexio]

Very nice review!

However this statement isn't entirely correct. That depends on the OS you use. If you are using Mac OS X the drive shuts down the drive when not in use for 30 minutes.

In Windows, the drive never shuts off.

Thank you

I didn't know that's a Mac OS X software feature, but my Western Digital My Book has it as a hardware feature (which also works in Windows). The platters in this drive basically show down to a complete stop (or very close) and it comes to life again when the disk is accessed. This is what I meant with "a complete shut-down"

[alexio]

I've taken a look at that copy button and it's quite useful. After installing the required OTB (One Touch Back-up) utility this button can be used to pop-up the utility (which always runs in the back-ground) to be used as tool for copy operations from and to the drive with some nifty features to quickly create new folders and view the copying process.

I don't have a computer to do some tests because I'm away from home, so I can't test the utility or take some screenshots, but the pictures in the manual look pretty nice

[tetete]

you need to improve ur photographic skill,man

other than that, thanks for a nice review ^&^

[breakfromyou]

I have one of these, but I prefer my Vantec eSATA/USB hard drive dock :p

Vantec makes some pretty awesome stuff.