Performance

USB 3.0

With the help of USB 3.0, the unit manages to deliver the drive's best possible performance across the entire platter. You can see the HDTach curve decline nicely, just as if the hard drive was installed directly in the host computer. You will also get some solid write performance, which is on par with the drive's maximum capabilities. Both read and write performance is better than USB 2.0 so even with a 2.5 inch drive, there is a noticeable benefit when using USB 3.0.

USB 2.0

On the USB 2.0 front, the enclosure performs extremely well. As you can see by the HDTach RW graph above, the NexStar enclosure is held back by the slow drive on the outher edge of the platters. If that was not the case, we would see a read performance of just over 35 MB/s, but the real numbers are not much lower with a solid 33.5 MB/s read and 31.7 MB/s write.