![]() When connected to a 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, the drive manages to burst at over 236MB/s and sustain read and write transfer rates above 96MB/s. To see how much USB can constrain hard drive performance, we dropped a Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB into the BlacX and ran a few HD Tach benchmarks. With transfer rates maxing out at theoretical peak of 480Mbps≶0MB/s if you convert bits to bytesthe BlacX’s USB 2.0 interface is much slower than not only Firewire 800, but also external Serial ATA. ![]() That’s a good thing if you’re looking for broad compatibility with a wide range of PCs, and even Macs, but compatibility seems like the sort of thing that would be more important for a portable enclosure and less vital for a docking station. The SE model we’re looking at today sells for around $40 online, and you can also get a standard version without the four-port USB hub for as little as $30.Ĭonsidering its reasonable price tag, I suppose we should also excuse the fact that BlacX SE is USB-only. ![]() Visual flair is a luxury, though, and we’re willing to forgive the use of pedestrian plastics given the BlacX’s inexpensive price tag. I’m no slave to fashion, but if this is going to be sitting on my desk, it might as well look niceor at least as nice as the brushed aluminum enclosures that the BlacX might replace. While the BlacX doesn’t look too bad overall, I can’t help but wish that Thermaltake had upgraded the matte black plastic to something a little snazzier. The BlacX’s retina-roasting blue power and activity LEDs aren’t quite as subdued, but they at least face up, so it’s relatively easy to avoid being blinded. Even the branding is subtle, just as long as you ignore the requisite upper-case X, which presumably denotes the Xtremeness of hard drive hot-swapping. As its name implies, the docking station is all black, which should at least be unobtrusive enough for living rooms, offices, and labs alike. Thermaltake has essentially created a new class of external storage product.Īt first glance, it’s hard to know what to make of the BlacX. Read on to see what this unique take on external storage is all about.Īlthough the BlacX may have the same basic underpinnings as standard external hard drive enclosures, their implementation in a docking station is unique. Since I always have at least a couple of desktop drives sitting around the Benchmarking Sweatshop, I couldn’t resist taking the BlacX for a spin. ![]() Instead, it’s connected to a hot-swap hard drive docking station. Except this external interface isn’t hooked up to an enclosure that’s designed to be carried around. ![]() Thermaltake is turning that formula on its ear with the BlacX, which can easily connect standard 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drives to a PC’s external expansion ports. Provide protective casing so you can move a drive around without fear of damaging it, hook that up to an interface that you can easily plug into a PC without having to dig around inside the case, and you have a finished product. The formula for a portable hard drive enclosure is a simple one, so it’s no wonder the market is flooded with clones. Some differ on whether they wrap drives in plastic or aluminum, and you can choose from a virtual rainbow of LED colors, but that’s about it. All support the same mobile or desktop drive standards, have the same rough size and shape, and offer reasonably comparable performance. When you really get down to it, there isn’t much to them, nor are there many differences between the various flavors on the market. Normally we couldn’t be less interested in external hard drive products. ![]()
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