How many times have you needed to get access to the contents of a hard drive from a dead computer, and you had to take your working computer apart to attach it? I have had to do this several times and it is a real pain. For this reason I got the Thermaltake BlacX hard drive dock.

Features

• 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

The BlacX supports both the 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA hard drives. This covers most hard drives that you will run into while repairing computers. If you have an older computer that does not use SATA then this will not work.

2.5″ hard drive

3.5″ hard drive

The ability to hot-swap the hard drives is extremely useful. This makes it possible to transfer files from multiple hard drives without having to shut down the computer.

Connecting the Thermaltake BlacX to a computer is very easy. It supports both eSTAT and USB 2.0 and that should cover any computer.

Design

The design is very simple, the Thermaltake BlacX is square shaped with very few controls.

Front

The back of the box is where all the connector and the power button are found. As you can see there are connectors for power, USB, and eSATA.

Back

The only other interesting parts are on the top. On top is the hard drive slot, an eject button, and an activity light. The eject button does not do anything special expect physically lift the hard drive away from the connectors so that it is no longer connected. The hard drive slot is where you find the connectors. If you push down the lid that covers the hard drive slot you will simply see a SATA and power connector. The connectors require that the hard drive is inserted with the correct orientation. So I like to push open the lid with my finger just to make sure I am going the correct direction.

Top	Activity light

Performance

The performance of the Thermaltake BlacX is great I didn’t have any trouble using the dock at all. I did however discover one quirk with the eSATA connection that disabled the hot-swapping.

The hot-swap functionality worked really well with USB, but my eSATA does not like it. In order for my computer to recognize the eSATA connection the hard drive has to be in the dock and turned on and plugged in when I turn on my computer. I cannot necessarily blame this on the Thermaltake BlacX because it could very well be a limitation in my computer. For this reason I mainly used the USB connector.

Since USB is slower than eSATA I did have to wait longer for my files to transfer. I mainly used this dock to get access to the files on hard drives that were removed from dead computers. Since these files consisted mainly of personal documents and not large files like moves, I did not really notice the speed difference.

Support and Warranty

The warranty on the Thermaltake BlacX is only 3 years. This is a decent warranty, but having a longer warranty is certainly preferred.

Conclusion

The Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive Dock is very useful for accessing files from hard drives. It has made my life easier because I no longer have to take my computer apart every time I need to get access to files on another computers hard drive. The price of the Thermaltake BlacX is also really great, it can be found on Newegg or Amazon for only $33.99. If you fix computers and need to get data off their hard drives, or if you have a bunch of old hard drives laying around, the Thermaltake BlacX is a great, inexpensive option for accomplishing your task.