Introduction

First of all i would like to thank Thermaltake for providing us with this item for a review. Thermaltake is a leader if innovative design of cases, power supplies and pc accessories. We hope to bring you more reviews from Thermaltake in the near future so hand tight. Today we are going to be taking a look at geeky accessory for you pc, BlacX. BlacX is designed to ease the use of the hard drives you might have around the house. If you are like me, then you would have 300 hard drives lying around for no particular reason. Finding the right data on them would cost me so much time that i don't even want to think about it. By using a product like BlacX it would make my life easier since i don't have to open my case and mount the hard drive and so on. Lets take a closer look at BlacX and see how it can benefit an average geek:)

About the Product

Following information is taken from the Thermaltake website.

Patented Design RoHS Compliance Supports All 2.5” & 3.5” SATA HDDs up to 2 TB ! Hot-Swap Capability for Rapid Multi HDDs Access & Exchange Supports eSATA Transfer Speed up to 3Gbps Supports USB 2.0 Transfer Speed up to 480Mbps Windows & Mac OS Compatible Compact Docking Station Design maximizes Heat Dissipation & Exhaust Windows Vista Ready !

Patented Design: 2.5” & 3.5” SATA HDD Docking Station (eSATA & USB 2.0), Supports All 2.5” & 3.5” SATA Hard Drives up to 2 TB !! Patented Design: Safely Detach SATA Hard Drives Without Damage !!             Easily Connects All 2.5” & 3.5” SATA Hard Drives Dual data transfer connectors: eSATA + USB 2.0

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at BlacX.

Closer look

Front shot		Rear shot

BlacX comes in a solid box and i have to add, rather light one. I was expecting it to be more than two pounds. The whole box is wrapped in the protective seal, so you know the item you are getting never been opened or tempered with. In the front of the box Thermaltake included a large photo of the BlacX and a 3.5" inch hard drive. This particular version comes with eSATA and USB 2.0 compatibility. On the back of the box we found a list of Features and Specifications along with some of the highlight of the unit.

BlacX		Screw less design

BlacX supports both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. So if you have laptop drive, you can definitely use it in BlacX. BlacX takes drives only with sata connection, not eide drives. So think carefully before looking in to this item. What makes BlacX stand out is the screw less functionality. You don't need to do anything else but sliding a hard drive in the proper slot.

Out of the box		Size comparison

The whole package comes with following, power supply, usb cable, esata cable and instruction manual. The manual is self explanatory and make sense if you read it trough. I strongly advise reading it before using BlacX with new/unformatted drives. The size of BlacX is significantly smaller than 3.5" hard drive and slightly bigger than a 2.5" hard drive.

Front of the BlacX		Rear of BlacX

Installing the hard drive is very easy. Just slide the hard drive in on the top and gently push it in the proper slot. In the front of the unit is a eject button which releases the hard drive. I strongly recommend powering down unit before removing the hard drive. On the front of the BlacX also is a small light indicator which shows the On state and Access state of the hard drive. On the back of the BlacX we found a power switch, DC-IN connector, USB2.0 connector and eSATA connector.

Ready to rock

Lets take a look at some performance data of BlacX.

Testing

We are going to be using HD Tach v 3.0.4.0 to perform some of the read and write tests to see how the BlacX will perform. HD Tach gives a great reporting over time on internal and external hard drive storage's. The hard drive we are going to be using is Western Digital Green Power 1tb Hard Drive.

HD Tach USB 2.0

First test we have performed was USB 2.0 test with 8Mb vs 32Mb. This test showed us that the average read speed is somewhere between 31.7MB/s and 33.5MB/s. This is pretty standard for the USB 2.0 connection. ( cant wait for usb 3.0 and what it can bring us:) )

HD Tach eSATA

Second test we have performed with eSATA connection. The 8Mb vs 32Mb benchmark showed us that the average read speeds were somewhere between 66.1 and 67 MB/s. The burst speed however was around 225 MB/s. Rather impressive. On 1 TB hard drive.

Conclusion

Very impressive performance and great accessory for any geek! To tell you the truth i have never seen a hard drive reader as this. Everything took less than 10 seconds to hook up and be on my way browsing trough files. Myself having hard drives with data on them all over, BlacX makes a valuable accessory. Judging by the benchmark data, BlacX is not going to be able to push data in and out any faster. For downloading files and browsing them BlacX is the best accessory i have dealt with. Thermaltake did a great job designing BlacX for ease of use. There are no fans to turn or heat sinks to keep cool. Just turn on and go! A highly recommended gear! 10/10!!!

Some pros we found:

Slick and silent operation.

Easy to use and very useful.

2.5" and 3.5" hard drives.

Great performance.

Some cons we found:

None that we could find.