Vantec Nexstar 3 eSATA/USB & eSATA PC Card

Vantec Nexstar 3 eSATA/USB & eSATA PC Card

Published August 25, 2008 at 01:16:02 PM, by Tim Supples

Overview

Vantec makes a wide range of computer accessories, for both laptop and desktop users. We found their LapCool4 cooling pad to be a quality device with a great fit & finish, loaded with features. Today we're taking a look at the Nexstar 3 3.5" hard drive enclosure and their eSATA PC Card. The Nexstar 3 NST-360SU features USB and eSATA connections for a 3.5" SATA hard drive with its own external power adapter.

The eSATA interface has been around for a while, but just hasn't caught on yet. As you can see from the illustration above, courtesy the SATA-IO Organization, eSATA was designed to utilize the superior throughput of the SATA standard without adding overhead like USB or Firewire.

Today we'll discuss the build quality and features of these storage accessories from Vantec, as well as take a look at some real-world testing to see how USB and eSATA stack up.

Vantec Nexstar 3 & eSATA PC Card

When you first open the package from Vantec, the first thing you'll notice is the attention and detail taken with these products. The shiny finish on the metal enclosure is very eye catching, and rather reflective. We got a stylish blue colored model for review, but a black finish is also available. Some of their other enclosures are available in a striking red color, but all of their products just ooze quality.

The faceplate is home to all of your connections, ideally setup for you to place the enclosure with cables going towards the back of your desk. From left to right you have the power toggle switch, power connector, eSATA plug, and USB plug.

Installation is resoundingly simple, all you need is a small philips head screwdriver. Remove the two screws on either side of the face plate, then slide the metal enclosure back away from the faceplate. Be careful pulling on the faceplate, it feels a little flimsy and may break if you don't take caution. You will be left with a metal tray to slide your 3.5" hard drive into, with four screw holes to secure the hard drive to the tray. We found the tray a little cramped sliding our Western Digital 3.5" hard drive into it, but it fit fine once you get it in there.

Slide the drive almost entirely into the tray, leaving just enough room that the SATA adapter can plug into the drive. If you push the drive all the way in, you may have trouble plugging the adapter in with so little room between the drive and faceplate. Once the drive is in place and secured, just slide the enclosure over the tray and put the screws back in the faceplate. Voila, you are done! Once properly setup and plugged into power, flip that switch and a bright blue LED on the front lights up to let you know the drive is active. The LED also flashes with drive activity to let you know it is working.

The Vantec eSATA PC Card UGT-ST350CB slides into your available PCMCIA slot, a slot which is slowly disappearing in favor of the newer, faster ExpressCard. 32-bit PC Card throughput tops at out a maximum of 132 megabytes per second, a rate which you will likely never see under any circumstance. The faster ExpressCard interface supports a maximum of 320 megabytes per second, again a throughput which you will likely never see, but still one that is much faster than PC Card. Serial ATA hard drives currently use one of two interface speeds, either 150 or 300 megabytes per second, making it a good match for the ExpressCard interface and eSATA.

Vantec includes a driver CD for the PC Card, however it is rather useless. They include just about every single driver for all of their products, but we were unable to find the proper driver for this PC Card. Instead, we ventured out to their website and under the "PCI Cards" category in Downloads, we found the UGT-ST350-CB Windows XP/2000 drivers. These files worked without a hitch, but Vantec needs to work on their distributed driver CD as well as their website organization. Average Joe probably wouldn't have been able to find the proper drivers and go through the process of pointing Windows to find the proper driver, although Average Joe probably wouldn't be purchasing an external eSATA/USB enclosure.

Regardless, once you get the drivers installed, you are ready to start using a 3.5" SATA hard drive of your choice as an external storage device. The USB and eSATA interfaces connect and work with Windows XP flawlessly, although there is one minor caveat to the process. You cannot have both USB and eSATA cables connected to the enclosure at the same time for quick switching or even device sharing, i.e. plugging the device into one computer via eSATA and another via USB. We tried leaving the eSATA cable plugged in on the enclosure, but unplugged on the PC Card, and then hooking up the USB connection. For whatever reason, the enclosure would not function and be detected by Windows. This isn't a big problem, but it would be neat if Vantec found a way around this. How convenient would it be to plug a random laptop into the enclosure via USB to grab some files without having to disconnect the eSATA interface?

Setup Method

Lenovo was kind enough to loan us a slick new ThinkPad T60:

Specifications	IBM ThinkPad T60
Processor	Intel Core Duo T2500 (2.0GHz, 2MB L2 Cache)
Front Side Bus	667MHz
Chipset	Intel 945PM
LCD	15" SXGA+ (1400x1050)
Memory	1GB (2x512MB) DDR2 667 SO-DIMM
Graphics	ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 with 128MB VRAM
Operating System	Windows XP Professional w/SP2

The ThinkPad T60 was set to run at full performance by setting the power scheme set to 'Home/Office Desk' with the AC plugged in, meaning that the CPU will not underclock while running the tests. Each test was repeated 3 times to ensure accuracy. Before each test was run, the laptop was rebooted and its hard drive defragmented. The 3.5" hard drive we used in the Vantec enclosure was an older Western Digital WD800 3.5" SATA hard drive:

Specifications	Western Digital WD800
Capacity	80GB
Spindle Speed	7200rpm
Cache	8MB
Interface	SATA I
Seek Time	8.9ms

 

Synthetic Tests

IOMeter 2004.07.30 is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool, originally developed by Intel. We ran four different tests using IOMeter, consisting of two different tests performed at both 100% read and 100% write. CPU utilization is also measured during each test. To obtain an idea of CPU utilization, we averaged the read & write utilization during each of the Maximum I/O and Maximum Throughput tests.

• Maximum Throughput: This test simulates maximum drive throughput using 64KB packet sizes in 100% sequential order, performed at both 100% read and 100% write.
• Maximum I/O : This test simulates maximum drive I/O performance using 512 Byte packet sizes in 100% sequential order, performed at both 100% read and 100% write.

WinBench99 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures the performance of a PC's graphics, disk, and video subsystems in a Windows environment. We ran the Disk Transfer Rate test.

Real World Tests

Note: All of the timed tests were repeated three times, with the drive defragmented and rebooted between test runs. The final score is the average of the three scores.

400MB File Copy Time is measured as the time is takes to copy a 400MB file from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the external drive.

400x1MB File Copy Time is measured as the time is takes to copy 400 1MB files from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the external drive.

2GB File Copy is the amount of time it takes to copy a 2GB file from the internal hard drive to the external drive.

WinBench99

WinBench99 shows a surprising trend we will see throughout these tests: the eSATA PC Card really opens up the performance on this older hard drive. USB is very limiting, with its low 60 megabytes per second throughput and generally high overhead. While USB is relatively universal and of course extremely popular, it is not the interface of choice when it comes to high speed data transfer. Even though the 2.5" hard drive in the Seagate external unit generally performs less than most any 3.5" drive, its performance is about on-par with the 3.5" drive in the enclosure over USB. The eSATA card could really show its potential with a full ExpressCard interface and more modern 3.5" SATA II hard drive.

IOMeter

IOmeter worked its magic again, filling these empty drives with a test file and finding just how fast these little beauties will go.

We see very similar results to the Winbench99 tests, again showing how much extra throughput the eSATA PC Card provides.

As we previously mentioned, USB involves a lot of overhead, which reduces performance. Extra overhead means more CPU cycles eaten up, as shown in our results here. Whatever bridge chip Seagate is using in their external enclosure, it is rather inferior to the one in the Vantec enclosure. Despite similar performance between the two devices, the Vantec Nexstar 3 over USB offers far less CPU utilization. The results from the eSATA PC Card are even lower, barely registering.

File Copy Tests

Now we move onto our real world tests, which show some very interesting results indeed.

With an average 65% decrease in copy times by using the eSATA PC Card, the performance leader here isn't a question. The 2GB file copy shows a huge improvement, with file copy times reduced by over 30 seconds. Pair this enclosure with an eSATA ExpressCard and newer SATA II hard drive and you will have a killer external storage solution. Now if only laptop manufacturers will incorporate some kind of highly efficient, high speed interface so we can do without the bulky add-on card.

Conclusion

Pro's:

• High quality enclosure
• Stylish design
• Great eSATA performance
• Relatively inexpensive

Con's:

• Useless driver CD
• Somewhat flimsy faceplate

Specifications	Vantec Nexstar 3 NST-360SU	Vantec eSATA PC Card UGT-ST350-CB
Dimensions	206x123x33mm (8.1"x4.8"x1.3")	115x54x16mm (4.5"x2.1"x1.3")
Interface	eSATA & USB	PCMCIA
Colors	Black, Blue	N/A
Price (NewEgg.com)	$29.99	$26.59

Vantec's external storage solutions are high quality, well designed products that any computer enthusiast can appreciate. The stylish and well built Nexstar 3 NST-360SU offers a solid enclosure and lets you pick the hard drive of your choice for an excellent external storage solution. Combine that with the eSATA PC Card and you've got a high speed, low latency storage device that can serve anyone's needs.

If you're worried about future compatibility with the emerging ExpressCard standard on laptops, Vantec has plans to release an ExpressCard version of the eSATA adapter. This card should offer improved performance thanks to the wide bandwidth of the PCI Express bus, especially when combined with a high performance SATA II 3.5" hard drive.

Vantec can and should easily change how they distribute drivers with their products, taking away the major negative for this product. The faceplate on the enclosure does feel a little flmsy if you plan on swapping hard drives a lot, but most users will put in a hard drive and leave it there for a while. Regardless, this is still a very nice package and will look very stylish on your desk. Accordingly, we have awarded this the LaptopLogic Highly Recommended award:

Availability
The Vantec Nexstar NST-360SUBL is available now, check the latest prices. The Vantec eSATA PC Card UGT-ST350CB is available now, check the latest prices.

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Technical Specifications

No specifications are available.