Vantec NexStar JX Series, USB 3.2 Gen2x1 (10Gbps), USB C, 2.5" SATA Drive Enclosure for 9.5mm & 7mm SSD/HDD (NST-258S3-BK)

Was looking for a “DIY” USB HDD solution that was USB-C, I was hopeful this would be it with the idea being if the drive inside ever dies it could just be swapped out. Well the only real thing this has achieved is it being USB-C… This enclosure has been nothing but problems. To start off the USB C-C cable it came with was defective. It technically “worked” but was unstable, EMI shielding was not great from what I could tell. The drive inside would go to sleep and disconnect if it was not interacted with for 5-10 minutes, breaking things like like encoding video and coming back to find it halted as the drive disconnected… It also seems that if you hit the drive inside with to many inquiries it would crash the interface and it would disconnect and reconnect. The two disconnecting issues mentioned are not driver issues but the enclosure. I tested it with 5 different drives with a mixture of medium types. HDDs, SSDs, and SSHDs all showed the same behavior. Running VMs of this is extremely annoying with it “crashing” all the time… I would not recommend this shortcuted product.

We use this brand before for other items so thought this would work well, boy we were wrong... Drive installed ok, nice quality feel, connected to a PC, worked... connected to another 4 PCs, didnt work, Windows says theres an error, unable to get an Address ID, checking this appears to be drivers, so we hunt, there are none as it doenst need them. We tested this on QNAP, Lenovo and Intel systems all the same problem, can only assume the SATA to USB bridge design is defective. We ordered 4, they were all sent back. Incase you wonder, they were all Western Digital 1Tb RED drives, they also all worked (the same drive with the same data) on other SATA to USB bridged (powered from the USB port) on all the same systems, so it was this case being the problem.