Thermaltake “BlacX” Drive Dock - Best $40
March 30, 2008 – 10:18 amLike many techies, I have a lot of internal hard drives sitting around - some of them are full and kept in storage for x-reason, and others are just sitting by, partly used or completely unused. A quick survey of my office reveals that I have 4 old school ATA drives (80GB to 200GB), 9 SATA drives (250GB to 500GB) and 6 SATA laptop drives (120GB to 160GB). I’ve also got a few cheapo external enclosures that I’ve used for quickly pulling data from random drives. The SATA laptop drives hardly ever get touched - not because they’re defective, but because it’s a pain in the neck to connect and disconnect drives over and over again. After a while, the external enclosures’ wires and data cables get weak from so much swapping, leading to potential electrical shorts and data loss. Not a good situation.
Due to CompUSA’s closure, I was shopping at Fry’s recently (the fact that I loathe and despise Fry’s is another issue) and found a great item - the “Thermaltake BlacX” external USB 2.0 drive dock. It accepts both 3.5″ SATA and 2.5″ SATA drives, has its SATA connections firmly built into the body of the device itself (thereby preventing the all-too-common weakening of connectors) and the drives, once inserted, sit vertically into the air, allowing for excellent heat dissipation. It works with Mac and PC. The Thermaltake BlacX even has a little “eject” button for popping drives off the SATA connectors. The price was $39.95.
So far, this peripheral/accessory/tool has been incredibly useful. I’ve been able to use my 2.5″ SATA drives on a daily basis, and it’s less than a 5 second task for me to pull a drive from another computer (PC or Mac), pop it into the BlacX bay and pull/write necessary data and then eject.
All things considered, this is probably the handiest $40 tech item I’ve purchased in years. That said, I can think of a few improvements that Thermaltake could make.
- USB hub on the front and/or sides
- a better product name. Honestly… BlacX? WTF? (Morans on the marketing team!)
- a FireWire 400 or 800 version of this drive bay. I’d pay extra for that!
Here’s the drive dock with a 2.5″ SATA drive:
Stumble it!
Tags: Technology, Thermaltake BlacX
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An
2 Responses to “Thermaltake “BlacX” Drive Dock - Best $40”
Any better name for this BlacX ?
we have the BlacX SE with feature 4 USB hub in front. and the coming soon eSATA.
thanks
By Ramsom Koay on Mar 31, 2008
Ramsom - thanks for the info on the USB hub version of the BlacX. As for better names - how about:
Thermaltake DriveDock
Thermaltake QuickDrive
Thermaltake QuickDock
Thermaltake SATA Dock
Thermaltake xDock (as in, Xternal Dock)
Thermaltake xDrive (as in, Xternal Drive)
Thermaltake CoolDock (hints at keeping drives cool)
ad infinitum… all better than BlacX.
I hope that helps. Really - there are some good names, and most of these will easily check out as free and clear on the US Patent and Trademark Office website.
As for the name BlacX, it sounds like “blacks”, which some people may consider an offensive racial term. It is also reminiscent of the TrekStor MP3 player called “iBeat Blaxx”. The fact that it sounds like “I beat blacks” raised a huge PR nightmare for the company and their chief exec had to apologize AND change the name of the MP3 player. Thermaltake BlacX isn’t nearly as bad as “iBeat Blaxx”, but the product name is bad enough. At least the product itself is great.
Jason
By JasonTomczak on Mar 31, 2008