Monday 2 September 2013

StarTech or Vantec for SuperSpeed USB 3 Enclosures and Hubs?

Hands down our choice is for StarTech.

image

The above is a 2.5" drive enclosure with a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM SATA drive installed. Mean throughput seems to be around 60MB/Second to 80MB/Second.

image

The 3.5" enclosure has a 2TB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive installed. Throughput seems to be about the same as the 2.5" drive.

The following link lists all of StarTech's single drive SuperSpeed enclosures:

We also have a 2.5" SuperSpeed enclosure coming that can mount ISOs and present them to the connected device as an optical drive.

image

Both drives are connected to the above SuperSpeed USB 3 hub.

We are using the 3.5" drive to host VHDX files. We have Windows Server 2012 Essentials, Windows Server 2012 with Exchange 2013 RTM, Windows Server 2012 with SharePoint Foundation 2013, Windows Server 2012 with the Remote Desktop Services Role, Windows 8 Enterprise, and finally a Windows Server 2008 R2 OS set up with RRAS to NAT between the Internal and our own networks.

We've passed _a lot_ of data across these SuperSpeed devices without a hiccup.

The same could not be said for the Vantec SuperSpeed USB 3 hub and enclosures. They would cut out causing everything to come to a standstill. We went so far as to try a D-Link SuperSpeed USB 3 hub to see if it would work better but we ended up with connectivity issues.

In the end, we are quite happy with the StarTech products especially their stability with so much data flying around on the USB 3 bus.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

No comments: