Vantec NexStar MX Dual 3.5" External SATA Drive Enclosure

The install:

Installation is quite simple.  Remove the four mounting screws and slide the hard drive tray out the back as shown here.

As you can see, the tray supports both drives in a stack built like a standard case cage. 

The drives will slide directly into the sockets shown here, and are fixed in place by the included screws.  Notice the JBOD switch at the top of the controller card, this is how you can set the controller to manually setup JBOD.

What is JBOD / SPAN?

JBOD is a popular RAID Array setup often used in external enclosures.  JBOD or "Just a Bunch Of Disks" is simply a bunch of disk drives concentrated together to make one large logical drive.

If you would like to read more about RAID, please visit our RAID Guide here.

Today's test drives will be two of Seagate's 7200.10 series hard drives.  These drives are great performers and carry a fantastic 5 year warranty.  Combined with the, low price point, either of these drives makes a great choice for any external enclosure.

Installing the drives turns out to be as easy as we expected.  The finished product leaves a small gap around the drives to allow air to be drawn in the front vents and exhausted out the back by the cooling fan.  The fan is not loud but with the PC powered down the drive enclosure is clearly audible across the room.

Testing:

To test the Vantec NexStar MX I used a build based in the ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X motherboard.  The build includes an AMD Athlon AM2 5600+,  2 x EVGA 7800 GTX cards cooled by Artic Cooling 5 series coolers and a x 2 GB kit of Crucial Ballistix Series DDR2-8500 powered by an Ultra X3 1000 Watt power supply.  Internal storage was provided by both 160 GB and 250 GB Maxtor SATA II drives and a Lite-on 16x DVD burner.

Hardware	Model
Motherboard:	ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X
CPU	AMD AM2 5600+
Memory	2x 2 GB kit of Crucial Ballistix Series DDR2-8500
Graphics	2 x EVGA 7800 GTX
Power Supply	Ultra X3 1000 Watt
Drives	160 and 250 GB Maxtor SATA II, 16X Lite-on DVD Burner

To provide hard drive benchmarking I'll be using Hard Drive Tach. HD Tach has proven very reliable for us over the years and I like to stick with what works. The following tests will be conducted using the nForce 590i onboard SATA controller via an external adapter.

I first tested the 160 GB drive and as with previous USB enclosures, the USB 2.0 works great, requires no drivers for Windows 2000 or XP, and was hassle free. The USB 2.0 just can't measure up to the speed these SATA drives are capable of. The burst rate of the Vantec NexStar MX clocks in at 36.3 MB/s and average read and write speeds of 34.5 MB/s and 34.1 MB/s, measuring this enclosure about equal to the fastest enclosures we have tested.

Now lets try the larger 250 GB drive. Again, the USB 2.0 proves to be the bottleneck for read write speeds but interestingly the 250 GB drive posted ClubOC best burst speeds for a USB enclosure with a blazing 96.1 MB/s score. The average read and write speeds of 31.8 MB/s and 32.7 MB/s again show the upper limits you can expect from a USB 2.0 drive enclosure.

Software:

The NexStar MX enclosure is one of the few we have tested that ships with a back up software solution.  Arcsoft TotalMedia Backup is a simple wizard driven back up solution designed to allow users of all technical experience levels to easily identify and back up personal data. 

As you can see here, the software uses common file tags to scan your system and recommend file backups.  The advanced option allows for much greater customization and both full and incremental backup options are offered.  The retail price of this suite from ArcSoft is $49.99 making this a nice value added inclusion.  The retail version does include some additional bells and whistles such as disk burning for backups.

Conclusion:

External drives are becoming an indispensable tool for added storage and backup.  With the NexStar MX enclosure, Vantec brings several nice additions to the typical USB enclosure.  The support of one or two drives makes it easy to add a second drive as your budget allows for when those terabyte monsters finally reach under $100! (Yeah Right!)  The ease of setup and the small footprint make this attractive enclosure a welcome addition to my already cluttered desktop as well.  I found the software to be simple to use and setup making it a nice addition to the package that may help justify the higher than average price.

The only real down side is the USB speed bottleneck.  I am sure its just a question of time before there is a NexStar MX2 that supports the much faster eSATA standards.  But if you are looking for a way to add external storage to your USB supported PC or laptop, this is definitely one of the better kits out there.

Note: Club Overclocker is now using a new rating system based on a score of 1 to 5.
Please go to our rating system page for more information.

Performance:	3 out of 5
Innovation:	4 out of 5
Quality:	4 out of 5
Stability:	4 out of 5
Aesthetics:	4 out of 5
Software/Drivers Pack:	3 out of 5
Overclocking:	N/A
Value:	4 out of 5
Project Skill Level (5 being most difficult)	3 out of 5