Hard Drives on Sale

Vantec isn't the most well-known company, but they make some very good hard drive enclosures and this is no exception.

The enclosure itself is one solid piece of aluminum with two end plastic pieces (one of which is attached to the hardware and plugs into your hard drive). The aluminum does a great job of dissipating heat and rarely feels hot to the touch, even during heavy use. There's no on/off button on the drive and there is one single blue LED that flickers to indicate drive activity. There's a jack for an A/C adapter, but it doesn't come with one. Instead, they package a Y-splitter USB cable so you can draw additional power from a second USB port if needed. On the opposite end of the drive is a thin mirror detail that adds a bit of pointless (but not unappreciated) shiny. The packaging was also very nice and compact.

Installing/removing a hard drive is a snap. All of the circuitry is attached to one of the plastic end pieces and that snaps right into... Read more

Bought this thinking it would be a bit of a task to put the my old drive in it, I was wrong. It's basically 3 parts, the body, the cover/board and 2 screws. You plug in the cover/board to the drive, slide the drive into the enclosure and place the two screws (#0) and you're done! I reformatted the drive as it had an OS on it since I replaced my macbook drive with a 500gb drive. for $14.99 I have a portable 250gb drive, AWESOME!

The enclosure uses uses mini USB, the cable supplied has mini-USB on one end and two USB 2.0 connections on the other, this is cool if you have an older mac or a PC that has a USB port that does not supply enough power to run the drive. The new Mac's only need one to make this one spin but it's good they provided it to ensure no problems with other machines.

NOTE:
One thing to note if you have never erased a drive with an OS on it. I had to figure this out. Disk Utility would not just let me reformat the drive because many of... Read more

It's first worth noting that this hard drive enclosure, like many of Vantec's other products, are really just generic external drive enclosures rebranded by Vantec; if you go on other online retailers, you'll find plenty of other drive enclosures exactly identical to this but sold under another brand. I myself have a StarTech 2.5" USB 2-SATA drive enclosure that is almost exactly identical to this product. Where Vantec has distinguished itself, traditionally, is its exemplary Mac support (with them even going to the trouble of including Mac OS 9 drivers on a hybrid Mac/Windows CD-ROM, and describing how to format external drives in OS 9 and OS X, in the case of their 3.5" FW400/USB2 drive enclosures), and their willingness to include nice little extras, like good quality power adapters, stands, and the like.

Compared to an earlier 2.5" USB 2-SATA drive enclosure sold by Vantec, the NexStar SX, the NexStar CX falls a little short. Like the SX, the CX is almost toolless,... Read more