KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Netstor's tagline for the NA611TB3 on its website is “small yet stunningly fast', and they're not kidding. Small enough to be easily carried around (not forgetting the external power supply of course) and supporting a pair of NVMe SSDs, each with a PCIe 3.0 x2 connection accessed via a Thunderbolt 3 interface – this is one extremely fast external drive, although just how fast depends on the drive(s) being used.
As we said, just how fast the NA611TB3 is depends on what drives you are using. There's a compatibility chart on Netstor's website but one of our test drives, the Intel SSD760p, isn't on it, but as that's a very recent drive that's understandable. In any case it worked fine.
The fastest sequential read speed we got from the NA611TB3 with the ATTO benchmark was 2487MB/s from the pair of Samsung SSD 960 EVOs in a RAID 0 array. However, the fastest write speed was the 1861MB/s from the Intel SSD 760p / Toshiba RD400 combination also in a RAID 0 array.
The Netstor NA611TB3 comes with quite a hefty price tag considering it's an empty drive enclosure, and you then you have to factor in the cost of one or two PCIe NVMe M.2 drives so the price could mount up to a good deal more. For the professional user wanting to shift large media files around at fast speeds, however, it might well be a price worth paying.
Netstor's NA611TB3 is the fastest portable external drive we've tested to date by quite some margin, across the configurations we used.
We found the Netstor NA611TB3 for £299.99 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros:
- Fast, very fast performance.
- Compact size.
- Thunderbolt 3 cable included.
Cons:
- Not cheap.
- Although easy to install the drive(s) it might be useful for a paper copy of the setup guide to be included.
KitGuru says: The NA611TB3 may be small in stature but with its Thunderbolt 3 interface and support for a pair of NVMe M.2 drives, it is powerful enough to transfer large files at lightning speeds.
