Installation

With the NexStar TX already disassembled, installing the hard drive is a snap. Simply plug the HDD into the SATA ports on the end cap. Once connected it easily slides into the aluminum enclosure and the two screws are fastened back into the holes. Once installed the hard disk is firmly in place and there is no noticable movement from within when it's lightly shaken. At this point the NexStar TX is ready for use. To connect to a computer, the USB adapter cable is connected to the enclosure and then one needs to connect the two standard USB connections to a computer. One USB connection is for supplying power and the other is for DATA transfer. The USB cable is only about 14 inches long which may be too short for some, however it does save on space for storage. As you can see with everything connected and powered up, a green LED light illuminates to indicate power and hard disk activity.

Performance

To test the performance of the Vantec Nexstar TX, we used a single 2.5" Hitatchi 7200 80GB hard disk drive. Performance was measured using HDTach 3.0.4.0 and ATTO Disk Benchmark.




Read bandwith, write bandwith and CPU utilization are all very good with the NexStar TX. Write bandwith in ATTO is above 30 MB/s which is outstanding for a USB 2.0 device. CPU utilization is a good 5% and this value can change from system to system. With 36.8 MB/s average read performance in HDTach it is the fastest external hard disk enclosure we have tested so far. Of course operation is silent with the exception of the hard disk mounted inside. The TX does do a very good job of isolating hard drive noise with its quality construction.