Works great. On e-sata, it is every bit as fast as if it was internally installed. I haven't used the USB interface, but it is probably quite a bit slower. My hard drives run barely warm to the touch. The eject button is really only there to help you pull it out. It works best for me to grab the drive and pull while pressing the button. The dock holds on to the drive pretty tightly, and if you eject the drive by simply pressing the eject button without holding/pulling the drive itself, it could easily pop completely out and fall on the desk or the floor. Falling isn't particularly great for hard drives, even if it is only a few inches.
This is SO much more useful than an enclosed external hard drive if you need several. Bare hard drives are a lot cheaper than the ones built into enclosures. They are very easy to install in this dock. It works a lot like putting an iPod into a dock, but this is a lot more robust. I use several hard drives in my computer. I have music on one, movies and recorded TV on another, etc., to keep all of that kind of stuff off my main drive. I have a couple more I use as backups. I put them in an antistatic bag and in my fire safe.
Some reviewers have commented about how it says it works up to 1TB or 1.5 TB. If yours says it works up to 1TB, it is only because you got an older printing of the box. When the box was printed, the largest drives commonly available were 1 TB. Now they have changed the box and the web site to say 1.5 TB. They only changed the box, not the product. I'm not sure why they put the "up to X.X TB" in there. Now drives are up to 2 TB, and they will all work with this as long as the BIOS and the OS in your PC will work with them. When they say "up to X.X TB", it leads people to believe that anything bigger won't work, but it will. This thing doesn't have a controller chip with a bios in it, just a simple straight through connection for the sata, and a simple bus bridge chip for USB. Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station
This is a great device for a bunch of reasons:
1. Backup. Using Acronis True Image 11 home, I can clone the drive in an hour. Put it off site and a bulletproof backup.
2. Reinstalling the operating system. I just reinstalled Vista (use it full time now that SP1 is out). I put my old Vista drive in the Blacx and could pull any info I needed right off the drive.
3. Booting different operating systems. I have three hard drives with different operating systems on them, Vista, XP , and Linux. I used to have them all in my PC but was afraid of a catastrophic failure (due mostly to me- I am a menace to my poor computer!). Now I can keep the drives out of the PC but insert and boot from them at any time. Just change the order of the boot hard drive in the BIOS.
4. Extra storage. Nice to be able to dump a bunch of older stuff into a drive. Keeps my boot drive clean and the access is there when I need it.
Cons? Not many. My WD drives run a little hot in the BlacX when booting from it. The power cord to the box is pretty short. You need to have an ESATA port on your PC (or in my case, and adapter and change the port in the BIOS).
Speed? On the ESATA, I notice NO speed slowdowns when booting from a drive in the BlacX in comparison to an internal SATA hard drive. They got it right with ESATA.
Clever engineering, works fine, easy to use, 5 stars.
Functionally, I have no problem with this hard disk docking station. Loading and unloading drives is very easy and requires no special drive rails. Because the drive aren't fully enclosed as they would be in a standard drive enclosure, they run fairly cool. Surprisingly, (since the drives are not fully enclosed) there doesn't seem to be any more drive noise than with a regular enclosure. The only fault I can find is that the cables are too short. Both the eSATA cable and the power cable are only about 3 and 1/2 feet long. That's just not long enough. Three and a half feet is just barely long enough to reach from the eSATA port on the back of my computer to my desktop. Likewise, it's just barely enough to reach from there to my UPS. Unless the top of your computer is fully accessible and that's where you plan to keep the enclosure (and it's close to your power supply), you need to be aware of this. I can understand 3.5 feet for the length of an eSATA cable. But, the power cable should be at least twice that. Because of the cable length issue, I'm knocking off one star and giving this Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Docking Station a Very Good four stars out of five.
These Thermaltakes are awesome.
- Why do I have 3? Juggling collections of data from different projects is way easy when you can just move them from one plug-in drive to another, without using your computer drives.
- Throw your tape drive & tapes away: you can get huge, fast 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives for under 100 bucks. You can Truecrypt the entire plug-in drive and then you have secure backup.
- This is also a way-better, cheaper, and more reliable way of using extra external drives versus proprietary cartridge systems.
- You don't need the absolute best drives if you are just using them for backup, because they are not going to be running 24x7 inside a hot enclosed computer or laptop case. I like to get decent and fast drives, but for backup purposes you can go with 5400rpm if you want to save a few bucks.
- Before I got my first Thermaltake, I was putting 2.5" drives into external enclosures, which are good if you are really carrying them around a lot, but now I just use the naked drives.
- You can store 10 2.5" drives in a plastic index-card box. I label each drive, and then put it in a snack-size plastic ziploc bag, and then into the index-card box. - Thermaltake - Esata - Hard Drive Dock - External Hard Drive'
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