Performance

One thing that may concern some people is the lack of a cooling fan in the enclosure. However, with the Vantec NexStar 3i, the entire aluminum casing acts as a passive cooler while the included power management saves on power usage which in turn leads to less heat. During the entire testing procedure the hard disk never went above 29 degrees Celcius at normal room temperature. As you can see, there are three LED indicators on the side of the unit displaying what power saving mode it is in. The Vantec logo on the front of the enclosure glows blue while the hard drive is being accessed.





Using HD Tach the Vantec NexStar 3i gives an excellent 36.4 MB/s average read speed and an outstanding 37.6 MB/s burst speed which is superior to any other enclosure we have tested so far! CPU utilization comes in at a good 6% though there are some enclosures that do a little better in this area. The ATTO disk benchmark shows good read performance as well, however write performance is a bit underwhelming, topping out at 27.5 MB/s. Performance overall is very good and the enclosure operated without a hitch, utilizing its power management properties while reading and writing to the hard drive quickly and efficiently.