Vantec NexStar USB 2.0 External Enclosure Review

Product: Vantec NexStar USB 2.0 External Enclosure
Author: Andrew Herdrich
Date Published: 10/10/04
Price: $38.99 + $4.99 S/H
Purchased at: Newegg.com

Introduction

During the course of the past year, we have seen many new advances in processor architecture, memory design, and video card performance. One year ago, the Pentium 4 “C” variant had just been released, and the Radeon 9700 Pro was the fastest graphics card on the market. Some things apparently don’t change though, like the hard drive market. Last time this year, the 300Gb Maxtor Maxline 5400 RPM drive was the largest drive available, and it is still near the top of the heap. Only a few manufacturers have spoken of new, large capacity drives, and even fewer have come up with a marketable design.

This stagnation has created a problem- the only way to reach storage capacities over a few hundred gigabytes was to stuff your case full of drives. Thankfully, over the past year, several manufacturers have released external USB enclosures to reduce some of the case clutter, while still allowing users to amass hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of stuff. One of these enclosures is the Vantec Nexus 3.5” external enclosure, which is the focus of this review.

This enclosure has several interesting features. First off, it comes equipped with a USB 2.0 interface, which increases the theoretical USB throughput rate to 480Mbps, over the previous 11Mbps standard. Secondly, this drive advertises hot-swapping, like many external enclosures, without the hassle of “stopping” the device through windows. This enclosure also features aluminum covers, and a very light weight.

Features and Specifications

First Impressions

This enclosure has several interesting features. First off, it comes equipped with a USB 2.0 interface, which increases the theoretical USB throughput rate to 480Mbps, over the previous 11Mbps standard. Secondly, this drive advertises hot-swapping, like many external enclosures, without the hassle of “stopping” the device through windows. This enclosure also features aluminum covers, and a very light weight.

Photos of the enlosure are included below.

Test Setup

To put this enclosure to the test, we’ll be using the following devices:

160Gb, 7200RPM, 8Mb Cache Maxtor PATA HDD
MSI NEO2-FIS2R i875P Motherboard, 8 USB 2.0 Ports
P4 “C” Northwood 2.8Ghz @ 3.36Ghz
1024Mb OCZ Performance Series PC-3200 DDR

Enclosure throughput will be measured using a variety of methods, including the following benchmarks:

HD Tach 2.70
Fixed File Size Transfer Tests
SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP1

Fixed file size transfer tests were performed on two partitions of the drive, with a 699Mb file, in an attempt to load down the interface and controller.

Benchmarks

Now for some benchmark numbers. The first test was HD Tach 2.70. The program easily recognized the external drive.

As you can see, when the drive was placed in the external enclosure, it was noticeably slower.

These results are reaffirmed by the SiSoft Sandra 2004 results:
The external drive scored 23Mb/Sec, while the internal drive scored 48Mb/Sec. This points to the ALI USB to IDE converter chip as the bottleneck.

The file transfer tests also support this theory:
It took 92 seconds to copy the file when the drive was in the enclosure, and only 35 seconds when the drive was on an IDE bus. This works out to 7.52Mb/sec. external, vs. 19.97Mb/sec. when the drive is on an IDE bus.

Conclusion

Overall, this enclosure has some strengths and weaknesses. It is small, portable, and looks good, but it is also noticeably slower than an IDE channel, and it generates a lot of heat. Another good thing about this enclosure is that during all of our tests and hotswappings, even during file copies, the drive never corrupted any data, or ruined the bootsector. Many other enclosures cannot boast that. The drive also works well with all the MSI BIOSes we used, which means that you can boot from this enclosure if necessary, and have no hard drives at all in your case. This drive would be great for a notebook user looking for some extra space, or for use as a gigantic thumbdrive, for transfering data and videos. If you need something really fast, look at SATA external enclosures.

PROs

Small
Lightweight
Portable
Inexpensive
Easy to use
No data corruption
Bootable!

CONs

Runs hot
Slower than IDE by 50% or more