Author: Andrew Schembri Date: February 01, 2008 Manufacturer: Vantec Provider: Vantec

« Introduction | Software » Page 2: Construction

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Vantec produces an array of quality PC products, such as power supplies, accessories, and cooling, and has long been regarded as a top notch manufacturer. Taking this into account, it is no surprise that the NexStar MX is of sturdy and solid construction. The enclosure stand has rubber pads to eliminate vibration noise.


The power adaptor uses a generic power cord such as that used on a regular PC. This makes things easy if one loses the power cord or forgets it plugged in somewhere.


Installation


There are four screws at the rear of the unit that unscrew to reveal a tray which houses two SATA hard drives. Simply slide the drives in, affix them to the unit with the provided screws, set the JBOD switch, and re-assemble the unit. Then, just attach the power cord and the USB cable and format the drives in disk management in Windows. The NexStar MX is installed automatically – no driver installation is required.


The JBOD switch allows the user to select ‘normal mode’ or ‘JBOD mode’. Normal mode simply shows the drives as completely separate in My Computer. JBOD, or just a bunch of disks, more technically referred to as spanning, combines the drives and presents them as only one drive to the computer. This means that if two 500GB drives were installed in the enclosure, the computer would see a single 1TB drive if the switch were in JBOD mode, and two independent 500GB drives if the switch were in normal mode.

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