Use

All that is required to operate the NexStar Dual Bay dock is to connect the power and eSATA or USB cables. The hard disks easily slide in and mount up to the bay without any complication. Once in place the drives sit stable and firmly and as you can see the white dock looks good with the drives mounted.


Once the power button is pressed a blue LED ring lights up around it to indicate operation. Below are two more blue LED indicators, one for each bay. The LEDs look good and are quite bright, but not too bright as they are encased in a frosted clear plastic.

Performance

To test the performance of the Vantec Nexstar Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock, we used a single Seagate 7200.10 1TB hard disk drive. Performance was measured using HDTach 3.0.4.0 and ATTO Disk Benchmark.

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 read performance with the Vantec NexStar Dual Bay is very good with a respectable 32.8 MB/s. Perfectly acceptable performance for something used as storage. Write performance is slightly lacking as ATTO Disk Benchmark indicates but it keeps up with most. In the past year or so there have been some new hard drive docks that have been getting excellent CPU utilization compared to many docks of the past. The NexStar dual bay is right around in the middle with 10% CPU utilization.

eSATA

Using the eSATA connection yielded no surprises with performance identical to using the HDD inside the PC with a standard SATA connection. So if you are looking for performance, eSATA is certainly the better choice compared to USB. USB, however, is supported by every computer out there.