Thermaltake BlacX Duet Docking Station

Introduction:

IT staff and computer repair shop technicians are always having to perform recovery tasks on their client’s hard drives. Whether it’s imaging or data recovery, you probably need to connect the drive to an enclosure. Many enclosures get the job done, but may not be friendly for quickly hot swapping drives, often times requiring unscrewing screws to release the drive. What do you do if you want to image to a new drive? You would either need a second enclosure for the new drive or create a local copy and then use the original enclosure. This takes too much time and effort. IT staff has more important things to do than fumble with unfriendly enclosures. There are servers to manage and tech review sites to read. Thermaltake helps make computer support easier with their new iteration in the BlacX line. We present the the Thermaltake BlacX Duet Docking Station.

Features:

• Read & Write 2 Hard Drives simultaneously
• Supports All 2.5” & 3.5” SATA Hard Drives up to 2TB (per slot)
• Hot-Swap Capability for Rapid Multi HDDs Access & Exchange* When utilizing eSATA interface, Port Multiplier feature is required on the host system’s eSATA
  controller for two hard disk drives to be seen at the same time.  All USB supports Port Multiplier function.
• Supports eSATA Transfer Speed up to 3.0 Gbps
• Supports USB 2.0 Transfer Speed up to 480 Mbps
• Windows & Mac OS Compatible
• Rapid Data Access & Exchange w/ Single eSATA or USB Cable Connection
• Open docking station design maximizes heat dissipation
• RoHS Compliance
• SSG (Solid State Grip) Technology: Anti-Slippery Grasp Base
• Windows 7 Ready !!

Specifications:

A Closer Look:

The front of box has a nice mock up of the docking station in action while the back lists the features and specifications.

The BlacX Duet comes with everything you need to start hooking up drives. The eSATA cable that’s included is a rather heavy gauge cable. I was impressed by this. It means they’re not cheaping out on their cables. The two LED’s on the power button double as a power light and activity lights.

While many new enclosures feature both eSATA and USB, not many feature two hard drive slots. The BlacX Duet has all of this and one caveat for using two drives with eSATA. The caveat is that in order to be able to use two drives at the same time over eSATA, your controller card needs to be able to support the port multiplier function. This isn’t a problem with USB as it just natively supports it. One thing we noticed in our testing is that in regards to communication between the two drives, they have to have all data routed through the computer. Basically it means that the drives are limited in speed by whatever connection they have whenever they communicate amongst themselves. When using the eSATA connection it shouldn’t have any significant impact for most drives, however the USB interface will limit the drives to a total of 480 Mbps communication amongst themselves, which can get saturated pretty easily.

Analysis:

I think the people that will really benefit from this product are computer support staff and your computer enthusiast with multiple drives. I would be bit wary about using the enclosure to permanently hold a drive for use as an external. The enclosure does leave the drives exposed to the elements (dropped soda, messy kids, etc). In a computer repair environment this shouldn’t be much of an issue as they should already have safeguards in place for those sorts of things. I’ve worked in both a computer repair shop and in large scale IT. From my experience, it would be super convenient to have an enclosure that I can slap two drives into and do a 1-to-1 copy of them without having to open up cases or fidget with screws.

Conclusion:

Thermaltake has done a nice job with their redesign of the BlacX line. It’s not often that a company can take an innovative product and improve upon it successfully. The quick release buttons make it easy to swap out drives. The build feels sturdy. This docking station should be a tool in your computer repairing repertoire.

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