Date: September 15th, 2010
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Vantec
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
All you have to do is connect a SATA hard drive to the adapter, plug in the power and USB cables, and turn it on. Any 3.5” or 2.5” SATA drive will work, and no drivers are needed. The OS will detect and install the drive automatically.
An LED will illuminate red when the power is on and flash a bluish purple during drive activity. The only noise generated will be from the drive itself – the adapter is silent.
For testing, I first copied a file that is 4.35GB in size between two SATA II drives in my test PC running Windows 7 Home Premium with all updates installed. It took 1 minute, 30 seconds. The same file was then transferred between the test PC and a 500GB Seagate SATA II drive connected to the Vantec adapter.
Let's see how transfers using SATA II compares to USB 2.0, and then USB 3.0. First, here are the results using USB 2.0:
4.35GB File Transfer (USB 2.0)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to external drive |
2:12 |
Read from external drive |
2:08 |
And here are the results using USB 3.0:
4.35GB File Transfer (USB 3.0)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to external drive |
1:25 |
Read from external drive |
1:19 |
As we can see from these results, USB 3.0 performed just as well as SATA II and easily surpassed USB 2.0. The increase in speed saves a lot of time when moving large files between hard drives, something PC technicians will appreciate. Using this little adapter proved to be very quick, convenient and portable. It's fully backward compatible with USB 2.0 as well, so you'll still be able to use it on almost any modern PC.
