Thermaltake BlacX HDD Dock

by mydz on 28/04/09 at 6:00 am

Adding a hard drive to your system a couple of years ago, required opening up the case, messing around with screws and washers, re-jigging your PSU wiring, and twisting an IDE cable around to plug into the new drive. And there used to be a few drawbacks to an external enclosure. Aside from requiring screws and washers, the enclosure itself lacked adequate cooling and you were limited to a USB connection. Lately though, these limitations have been removed, making a new enclosure a better bang for your buck.

dock-station

Take a look at Thermaltake BlacX HDD dock. Unlike a regular enclosure, the BlacX uses a neat docking system. And as the name implies, it is completely black throughout with its plastic construction. While it’s plastic, everything feels solid and well-built. Along the top center edge in front is a finger-sized mechanical eject button for ejecting the docked hard drive. Also, a spring help push-down cover is at the top with a gap opening at the top left corner to securely accommodate 2.5” SATA HDD in a vertical position, while standard 3.5” desktop hard drives are inserted with the door pressed down.

Now, let’s take a look at Thermaltake’s BlacX specifications:

• Compact docking station design maximizes heat dissipation and exhaust
• Supports all 2.5” and 3.5” SATA Hard Disk Drives, up to 1.5TB
• Supports eSATA Transfer Speed up to 3Gbps
• Supports USB 2.0 Transfer Speed up to 480Mbps
• Hot-Swap Capability for Rapid Multi HDDs Access and Exchange

If you’ve got a couple old 3.5” or 2.5” HDDs hanging around, this might be a smart investment. The Thermaltake BlackX HDD Dock can be had right here for a SUPER SAVER price of $36.99.