Review on 💾 Vantec Nexstar GX USB 3.0 Dual 2.5" SATA SSD/HDD RAID Enclosure, Black (NST-272S3-BK) – High-speed Storage Solution for Efficient Data Management by Jon Larjin

I suspect most people automatically think of USB 2.0 or 3.0 when adding an external drive to their system. For years I've had my little studio shuttle with two USB 3.0 ports and an additional port labeled USB 2.0/eSATA protruding from the front. Recently this shuttle has become my workhorse for data archiving and file packaging for use with other computers in my studio and research lab. I've been using eSATA for years but never thought about it when I needed to buy an external enclosure to transfer large files (50GB+) between computers. The USB 3.0 ports have served me well when using SSDs for this type of transfer, but when I tried the USB 3.0 port with a Seagate 3TB hard drive in both this and other cases, I was not enthusiastic about their performance. Out of interest, I tried the eSATA connection. Of course, I probably should have expected that, but when connected externally via SATA, the Seagate drive behaved similarly to the one in the Shuttle. That said, while this case achieved write speeds (to and the SSD in the shuttle) of around 30-50MB/s, when I connect it via eSATA I consistently see Seagate write speeds in excess of 100MB/s. I found this difference amazing. I have now bought the second of these as well as the 2.5" version to use with my SSD for file transfers. I am very happy with the eSATA performance of this drive. ----------- ---------------------- UPDATE I now have five of these units in my studio and lab. They remain reliable and fast when using eSATA. Comparable or even better performance with USB 3.0 (constant write speeds over 250MB/s, mainly for sequential files over 30GB from SSD to SSD) from most of my new computers, while an eSATA connection is a must in my old Shuttle studio , I now use USB 3.0 for most of their hardware work.