Vantec Nexstar 3 NST-360SU

A sleek hard drive drive enclosure with two of the most useful connectors you could wish for on the back.

The Nexstar 3 is a drive enclosure only; you’ll need to bring your own SATA drive. But this gives you options and keeps the price down, two points we love to have working in our favour.

It also supports 3Gbps SATA, which is nice to have but ultimately quite useless, as no hard drive currently available can use the entire available throughput. Something like a RAM drive in the chassis of 3.5mm hard drive or something equally nutty would do the trick though.

It’s a very generic unit. Welland make a suspiciously similar model to the Vantec, which we discovered thanks to the inclusion of a Welland power supply in the box. It uses a figure 8 power lead to connect to the mains and -- because it’s a switch mode power supply -- will work anywhere in the world. It supplies five volts at 1.5 amps and twelve volts at 1.8 amps through a proprietary (but commonly used) circular four pin plug.

A Sunplus SPIF215A USB 2 to SATA bridge provides the brains of the operation. The USB interface benchmarked at an average read speed of 36.7MB/s with no setup required. Using the e-SATA connector, transfers were much quicker and setup was equally simple. It clocked in at an average read speed of 61.2MB/s.

Those without an e-SATA connector on your motherboards will be glad to know that a SATA to e-SATA converter backplane is included. The two interfaces are the same, but they use different connectors (much like USB and Mini USB), making the cable a simple but useful addition to the package.

Regardless of the SATA configuration you end up using, it should be handled with more care than the USB connection. We’ve had systems keel over on us in the past when fooling with SATA ports and have seen our fair share of delayed write errors. Happily, we didn’t run into any problems removing the device when using the add/remove hardware option in the taskbar properly.

We like the snazzy piano black styling even though it’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Although there’s no fan we had no problems using the very hot 750GB 7200RPM Seagate behemoth with the Nexstar. We’d hesitate to throw a Raptor into it, though.

Other than the passive design, the only other fault we had with the unit was that unlike some other USB enclosures we’ve tested, it didn’t spin down the drive after inactivity. That means if you don’t disconnect it, it’ll clock up hours of use and fail faster than a unit that thoughtfully spins the drive down after half an hour or so.