Hands-on: NexStar Hard Drive Dock

The second gadget that my brother bought from the computer event held last time, is the Vantec's NexStar Hard Drive Dock; the NST-D100S2 serie.

Now I know some of us are often whining about storage, and on how much left of space there in our hard disk drives. And so, this is also what my brother had in mind when he bought the NexStar. Since he's very often to ran out of DVDs and hard drives space for his manga (Japanese comic), anime, movies, tv series & shows; which most of them are in high-def format.

And like the previously nice photo shots of the tablet-notebook, he's kind enough to made pictures for this one too (I think he wants to show-off his new gadgets to me & you ;-p). Do enjoy them all, by clicking on each of them to view them in larger size.

Opening the package of the NexStar was fun, it was neat and compact. As you may see in the animated picture above; there are not much besides the main unit, USB & power cable, mini-CD of driver and small sized manual book.

The main unit itself is colored with white glossy paint, a good match if placed next to his new tablet-notebook. On the front there's a big on/off button, and a long-thin line of read/write activity light. While on the top is where the hard disk slot located, it has a hinged compartment for 2.5"/3.5" SATA HDD. At the back, there is a power and a USB 2.0 interface.

There's no need to install any drivers for the NexStar, since Windows XP & Vista will automatically recognize every SATA HDD that you inserted as removable drive. A small squarish button next to the HDD slot will pop-out if the HDD is successfully inserted, and to remove can be simply done by pressing down that button while pulling out the HDD.

The big on/off button at front will emits cool blue light when active, a nice combination with the white glossy finish paint. Another good point from this NexStar Hard Drive Dock, is its performance. My brother tried several times to made "Ghost" copy with new SATA HDD, and it took only 5 minutes to restore around 15GB of data.

I've never thought that backing up and restoring huge data or files can be so easy before, no more hassle through many opening and closing the workstations' casing again. And of course the best of all it is mobile, the NexStar is light weight and just plug the USB jack into USB ports which can be found anywhere nowadays. And lastly the US$39.5 price tag, is a hard to miss bargain.
[blogged with my Treo 750v]