VantecNST-371C31-BK NexStar Gx USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C 3.5" Sata HDD/SSD Enclosure, Comes with C to C and C to A Cable, Aluminum Casing, Black

Worked great with a WD Red Plus drive for a mass photo archival project. I've purchased several other Vantec enclosures (2.5" ones) for occasional use applications, so I cannot speak to the longevity when a drive is left connected/powered on all the time.

Works fine for my purpose. It's well built and looks good. I use it to house a WD Gold 10 TB that is the external hard drive for my Xbox One X.One thing though: when assembling it the included long screws wouldn't go in on the bottom. I ended up using the long screws on the sides and the extra small ones on the bottom instead. Drive is secure and operates fine.Speed wise I used a certified USB 3.1 cable and this enclosure and it took a few hours to copy approx 750 GB of games. AFAIK Xbox One doesn't support UASP or USB 3.1 speeds. I guess I was transferring the data at the maximum speed limit the Xbox would allow.Updated review November 2021:Since I have a WD Gold hard drive I suspect it's the enclosure that's starting to give me problems. Sometimes it seems to randomly stop working with my Xbox. Again I'm not 100% sure whether it's the enclosure starting to fail or the hard drive. The hard drive was over $400 and this was less than $50 so draw your own conclusions. I'm going to buy another enclosure from a different brand and see if that remedies my situation.

I have been using this enclosure with a WD Black 4TB hard drive for over a year. The build quality of the enclosure is excellent and the drive is securely mounted in the enclosure with screws (which is not the case for a lot of enclosures, which use tabs to secure the drive). Plus it is fast -- if you use the USB-C connection with a USB 3.1 connection on your computer with UASP (USB Attached SCSI) support. My only complaint is that the enclosure has no cooling fan. It relies entirely on radiative cooling to keep the hard drive from overheating. The enclosure housing is aluminum, which helps with this, but if I leave the external hard drive on for a long time, it will begin to overheat. This may not be as much of a problem with a different hard drive (e.g. a WD Red) but with my WD Black it is.

I bought two of these, and they work great.HDDs - I have a 4TB WD Black HDD that gives me about 200 MB/s read & write , and a white label 8TB HDD shucked out of a WD My Book. That shucked drive worked natively WITHOUT needing to block the 3rd pin! I'm very happy about that little surprise. I'm seeing about 180 MB/s read & write out of that one. Some of my older Seagate drives have various slower speeds, but I don't have an Iron Wolf to test (my Baracuda Compute drives were disappointingly slow around 140/160 MB/s). It just shows not all HDDs are the same.SSDs - my Samsung 850 Pro and 860 Evo drives are getting me between 460 and 515 MB/s.All connected to a StarTech USB 3.1 Gen 2 hub, then to Thunderbolt 3 on my 2017 MBP. Tested using BlackMagic Design's Disk Speed Test app.The quality of the builds is solid. I have no worries about durability.It's nice that the enclosures, cables, and ports are no longer the bottleneck to the potential max speeds we are told to expect with storage.

I was running out of room on my offsite backup disk (USB 3.0, 2.5 in. 5tb external drive) that averaged 40MB/sec. I purchased the Vantec enclosure and installed 8tb 5400 Baraccuda 3.5in drive that averages 175MB/sec. Assembly was straight-forward. Had difficulty with the USB C connection the drive being recognized, but worked perfect with the USB 3.1 gen2 conection. Great they provided both cable options. Runs relatively cool at 119 degrees F. Other comments on the indicator light placement and where to put the feet seem insignificant. For me the sweet spot was this configuration compared to going to the Thunderbolt 3 option which doesn't give a proportionately incremental price/performance pricetag. I'm happy!!

I strongly suspect this company is fibbing about the specs on this fairly expensive disk enclosure. It's listed as being USB 3.1 Gen 2 and that is the main reason that I bought it. Put a Seagate FireCuda 3.5 inch 2TB 7200 rpm drive in and then ran some speed tests on my PC's legitimate USB-3.1 Gen2 "C" type port. Very mediocre performance! In doing the 1GB sequential test, read/write was around 40 MB/s which is way too low for this particular drive with this particular interface. I suspect there is nothing more than a plain vanilla USB 3.0 interface board hidden inside this enclosure. Given the high $40 price that Vantage is charging for this enclosure, I feel ripped off.As far as the mechanics of the enclosure, the outside metal is nice and strong but there are no vents on the top or bottom to help the heat escape which I think is not good if you are using one of the hotter running hard disks. No fan in this thing, either. Mounting screws they included were of poor quality and took several tries to get them into the hard disk mounting holes without getting stripped. Then inside "cage" that holds the actual drive is cheap plastic and very unimpressive. The SATA mount feels like it is not particularly secure when the disk is inserted. I've seen much better and more secure SATA pin mounting systems.Bottom line, you can do much better than this enclosure. The listed USB interface spec is suspect and I'm seeing poor hard disk performance. Not worth $40, more like $25 at best. Look elsewhere and be careful in believing some of the other reviews posted here.

I bought these enclosures for my backup drive. I'm waiting for them to make a Thunderbolt 5 version so my Mac can backup faster (maybe put an SSD inside :)