Nexstar 3 USB 2.0 IDE and USB 2.0/eSATA External Enclosure Review

For over a year now I have been using 2 very good external enclosure from VANTECH:

VANTEC Nexstar 3 NST-360U2-RD 3.5" Red USB 2.0 External Enclosure for IDE Hard Drives

VANTEC Nexstar 3 3.5" Blue USB 2.0 and eSATA External Enclosure for SATA Hard Drives



The Red Nexstar I have currently has a 250GB Western Digital Hard Drive that is currently formatted as FAT32 so I can use on both my Mac and PCs. It runs great, detects and loads fine in everything I have tested it in: Vista, XP, OS X and transfers data relatively fast via USB 2.0. I use this drive to store all my Photoshop, Flash, illustrator, and Indesign data. I can work on these documents directly off the drive with no problem.

The Blue Nexstar currently has a Maxtor 160GB Hard Drive which is also formatted at FAT32. The external enclosure also works great with this SATA drive and I have had no problems with it. I use this drive to store "My Documents", various backups, and my SVN repositories. I only have ran this via USB 2.0 but the enclosure did come with an eSATA PCI slot adapter that you can use with the enclosure. So for faster operation, you could use eSATA.

Overall I would highly recommend these enclosures, my prime reason on buying them was the price, they were $30 each on Newegg.com and saved me tons of money since I had spare hard drives laying around.

Enclosure on the left is the Blue SATA enclosure with eSATA and a USB 2.0 port, the enclosure on the right is a Red IDE enclosure with just a USB 2.0 port.


Also, in OS X you can change your drive icons, so when they mount, they are color coded to match the physical enclosures.

Meta: VANTECH Nexstar 3 external enclosure review, IDE, SATA, eSATA

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