External hard drive enclosures are great if you have to move large amounts of data around frequently or easily add storage to a packed desktop system.
With USB 2.0, though, transfers have always been capped at 33MB/s at best, making huge data backups a real snooze-fest. On the plus side, this meant your primary disk’s transfer speed didn’t matter at all—any reads and writes were limited by USB 2.0’s bandwidth limit. Those days will be drawing to a close as USB 3.0 takes hold. We’ve already tested one USB 3.0 external hard drive: the WD My Book 3.0 (reviewed April 2009). That was a fine product, but what if you already have a high-capacity backup drive and you just want to speed up your transfer times?
In that case, you may want to peep Vantec’s NexStar 3 SuperSpeed hard drive enclosure.
Continue reading this review after the jump.
