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Technical Details
- Brand Name: Thermaltake
- Model: ST0005U
- Hard Disk Size: 1024 GB
- Warranty: 3 years limited warranty
- Hardware Platform: PC, Mac
Product Details
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Product Description
Thermaltake USA BlacX eSATA HDD USB Dock Thermaltake BlacX 2.5"/3.5" SATA HDD USB and eSATA Docking Station with Patented Design...This compact docking station supports all 2.5" & 3.5" SATA HDDs up to 2TB; Hot-SwapCapability 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; RoHS compliant. Includes Dock, Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable & eSATA cable.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
122 of 126 people found the following review helpful
By Brad
Amazon Verified Purchase
Works great. On e-sata, it is every bit as fast as if it was internally installed. I haven't used the USB interface, but it is probably quite a bit slower. My hard drives run barely warm to the touch. The eject button is really only there to help you pull it out. It works best for me to grab the drive and pull while pressing the button. The dock holds on to the drive pretty tightly, and if you eject the drive by simply pressing the eject button without holding/pulling the drive itself, it could easily pop completely out and fall on the desk or the floor. Falling isn't particularly great for hard drives, even if it is only a few inches.
This is SO much more useful than an enclosed external hard drive if you need several. Bare hard drives are a lot cheaper than the ones built into enclosures. They are very easy to install in this dock. It works a lot like putting an iPod into a dock, but this is a lot more robust. I use several hard drives in my computer. I have music on one, movies and recorded TV on another, etc., to keep all of that kind of stuff off my main drive. I have a couple more I use as backups. I put them in an antistatic bag and in my fire safe.
Some reviewers have commented about how it says it works up to 1TB or 1.5 TB. If yours says it works up to 1TB, it is only because you got an older printing of the box. When the box was printed, the largest drives commonly available were 1 TB. Now they have changed the box and the web site to say 1.5 TB. They only changed the box, not the product. I'm not sure why they put the "up to X.X TB" in there. Now drives are up to 2 TB, and they will all work with this as long as the BIOS and the OS in your PC will work with them. When they say "up to X.X TB", it leads people to believe that anything bigger won't work, but it will. This thing doesn't have a controller chip with a bios in it, just a simple straight through connection for the sata, and a simple bus bridge chip for USB.
This is SO much more useful than an enclosed external hard drive if you need several. Bare hard drives are a lot cheaper than the ones built into enclosures. They are very easy to install in this dock. It works a lot like putting an iPod into a dock, but this is a lot more robust. I use several hard drives in my computer. I have music on one, movies and recorded TV on another, etc., to keep all of that kind of stuff off my main drive. I have a couple more I use as backups. I put them in an antistatic bag and in my fire safe.
Some reviewers have commented about how it says it works up to 1TB or 1.5 TB. If yours says it works up to 1TB, it is only because you got an older printing of the box. When the box was printed, the largest drives commonly available were 1 TB. Now they have changed the box and the web site to say 1.5 TB. They only changed the box, not the product. I'm not sure why they put the "up to X.X TB" in there. Now drives are up to 2 TB, and they will all work with this as long as the BIOS and the OS in your PC will work with them. When they say "up to X.X TB", it leads people to believe that anything bigger won't work, but it will. This thing doesn't have a controller chip with a bios in it, just a simple straight through connection for the sata, and a simple bus bridge chip for USB.
107 of 111 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a great device for a bunch of reasons:
1. Backup. Using Acronis True Image 11 home, I can clone the drive in an hour. Put it off site and a bulletproof backup.
2. Reinstalling the operating system. I just reinstalled Vista (use it full time now that SP1 is out). I put my old Vista drive in the Blacx and could pull any info I needed right off the drive.
3. Booting different operating systems. I have three hard drives with different operating systems on them, Vista, XP , and Linux. I used to have them all in my PC but was afraid of a catastrophic failure (due mostly to me- I am a menace to my poor computer!). Now I can keep the drives out of the PC but insert and boot from them at any time. Just change the order of the boot hard drive in the BIOS.
4. Extra storage. Nice to be able to dump a bunch of older stuff into a drive. Keeps my boot drive clean and the access is there when I need it.
Cons? Not many. My WD drives run a little hot in the BlacX when booting from it. The power cord to the box is pretty short. You need to have an ESATA port on your PC (or in my case, and adapter and change the port in the BIOS).
Speed? On the ESATA, I notice NO speed slowdowns when booting from a drive in the BlacX in comparison to an internal SATA hard drive. They got it right with ESATA.
Clever engineering, works fine, easy to use, 5 stars.
1. Backup. Using Acronis True Image 11 home, I can clone the drive in an hour. Put it off site and a bulletproof backup.
2. Reinstalling the operating system. I just reinstalled Vista (use it full time now that SP1 is out). I put my old Vista drive in the Blacx and could pull any info I needed right off the drive.
3. Booting different operating systems. I have three hard drives with different operating systems on them, Vista, XP , and Linux. I used to have them all in my PC but was afraid of a catastrophic failure (due mostly to me- I am a menace to my poor computer!). Now I can keep the drives out of the PC but insert and boot from them at any time. Just change the order of the boot hard drive in the BIOS.
4. Extra storage. Nice to be able to dump a bunch of older stuff into a drive. Keeps my boot drive clean and the access is there when I need it.
Cons? Not many. My WD drives run a little hot in the BlacX when booting from it. The power cord to the box is pretty short. You need to have an ESATA port on your PC (or in my case, and adapter and change the port in the BIOS).
Speed? On the ESATA, I notice NO speed slowdowns when booting from a drive in the BlacX in comparison to an internal SATA hard drive. They got it right with ESATA.
Clever engineering, works fine, easy to use, 5 stars.
54 of 57 people found the following review helpful
Functionally, I have no problem with this hard disk docking station. Loading and unloading drives is very easy and requires no special drive rails. Because the drive aren't fully enclosed as they would be in a standard drive enclosure, they run fairly cool. Surprisingly, (since the drives are not fully enclosed) there doesn't seem to be any more drive noise than with a regular enclosure. The only fault I can find is that the cables are too short. Both the eSATA cable and the power cable are only about 3 and 1/2 feet long. That's just not long enough. Three and a half feet is just barely long enough to reach from the eSATA port on the back of my computer to my desktop. Likewise, it's just barely enough to reach from there to my UPS. Unless the top of your computer is fully accessible and that's where you plan to keep the enclosure (and it's close to your power supply), you need to be aware of this. I can understand 3.5 feet for the length of an eSATA cable. But, the power cable should be at least twice that. Because of the cable length issue, I'm knocking off one star and giving this Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Docking Station a Very Good four stars out of five.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great buy
No easier way to get data off a hard drive or to connect an external drive. What a grey buy.
Published 12 days ago by Douglas A. Loesel
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Product
We purchased this station to help us get data off of old drives won't function properly. So far it has worked great and prevented a lot of extra work and cost.
Published 14 days ago by Eric K. Portteus
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easy to use. Excellent results.
It works great for my purposes, that is to say, data recovery from computer HDDs taken out of active service.
Published 20 days ago by John K Cassity
1.0 out of 5 stars
Does Not Work
This product disconnects and locks up the computer. There is no driver. It disconnects with either esata or usb. first the transfer speeds are VERY SLOW. Read more
Published 25 days ago by filmguydfw
4.0 out of 5 stars
worth it
This unit does what I wanted and it was priced fairly. I have to transfer files to and from different pc's and this this unit makes it very easy to use the old hard drives I had... Read more
Published 27 days ago by michael j strazzulla
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great product, crappy installation and power cord
The product works great for what I needed it to do.
Installation required several days of searching on the internet. Read more
Installation required several days of searching on the internet. Read more
Published 27 days ago by Kevin Sohnly
2.0 out of 5 stars
BEWARE Only Half Right
I bought this because the product description said it would work with ALL eSATA drives. I did work just as advertised on the SATA drive removed from my desktop computer. Read more
Published 28 days ago by R. E. Williams
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really cool little box!
I have used this a few times and I must say it worked like a charm. Saved my life. :) The only thing I did not know was, it does not do IDE Hard drives.. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Queen Mum
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easy Just Be Patient
10 years online retail ecommerce so I have lots of old drives that failed. One had a lot of tax info so I was freaking. Bought Blacx. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Michael Milstead
5.0 out of 5 stars
works perfectly
this is the second one I owned and it works perfect to save your data off old hard drives. rocks
Published 1 month ago by Dino V Soriano SR
