So when Vantec asked us to review some goodies we said yes obviously, so I got a nice big box filled with goodies, now lets check some of that out shal we.
First up for review is the Vantec NexStar3 external 3.5” harddrive enclosure, now I already have an external enclosure but I wondered what would the difference be? Well it turns out not much on the outside… but its on the inside what matters.
By just looking at the boxart you know instantly what your dealing with, so the box shows us this version has a USB 2.0 and(!) a firewire connection and additional information is on the back.
Now as showed on the box is that you can get anything up to 480Mbps on USB2.0 and looking in the manual we can get up to 400Mbps for firewire, so it’s a bit slower, but we’ll see how much in the benchmarking.
When opening the box you can clearly see what you bought and how its packed the aluminum enclosure has a high gloss finish that can function as an external HDD enclosure and a mirror, finished off with some chrome. Included in the package is all the mounting screws, the power supply, firewire and USB cables, and a vertical mounting stand.
Now I already had an enclosure as you read before, a Revoltec Alu Book edition, and guess what…. Almost identical, just look at the pictures its basically the same except for the USB module and some looks but the basic structure is identical which is handy cause now I can stack them :P.
So time to test these suckers, I did some benchmarking using ATTO Disk Benchmark. Whilst testing the content never changed I just swapped the HDD from one enclosure to another.
As you can see the Revoltec enclosure reached a peak of 26 Megabytes a second on USB no bench for the firewire cause the Revoltec dint have a firewire connection.
Now lets see how the Vantec NexStar3 preformed…
And hey look at that its faster beating the Revoltec one with over 1 Megabyte in speed difference, lets have a look at the firewire results. The firewire clocked in at about 20 Megabytes Write and 25 Megabytes Read. Now the reason why it’s a little slower then USB is because of the bandwidth since firewire is running at 400Mbps and USB2.0 at 480Mbps, however that doesn’t explain why the Read is just about the same as on USB, so I tried another test writing a 7Gigabyte file.
USB vs. Firewire
| USB | firewire | |
| Size | 7572881408 | 7572881408 |
| Time | 285047 ms | 395375 ms |
| Transfer Rate | 25,336 MB/s | 18,266 MB/s |
So what’s causing this? Well I don’t have a clue but I recon the Vantec’s firewire ports aren’t that super. Apparently Read isn’t a problem but writing is, but I get similar results on other PCs as well, I’ve asked Vantec for an explanation but till now I still had no response what so ever…
So the firewire is lacking some but can we complain, I say no the prices of the Vantec and Revoltec enclosures are the same but for the same price you do get a firewire port on the Vantec enclosure and a bit more speed over USB. So is this enclosure up for review a faulty product made on Monday…
Who knows then again you can get firewire cards for a few bucks so if you need cheap storage and are clean out of free USB slots then its an easy choice, contra USB cards don’t cost anything anymore as well so the choice is yours to make. Overall looks are great: the white logo sets off to the glossy black and the LED lights up the Vantec logo and isn’t too bright; something that was an annoyance at the Revoltec once causing me to use some electrical tape to dim the light.
Only downside I could find on this enclosure (except the firewire port) is the vertical stand in the way that it doesn’t have any rubber feet to keep some grip and most importantly to absorb vibration, cause I could hear the enclosure vibrate on my desk so it had to go flat again, a little thought could have been used there.
All in all this is a great enclosure with great speeds, its stackable and cheap, so if you’re in need of some cheap storage space and your IDE/SATA ports are filled there might help you out.
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