sata hdd usb docking station

Rating:
Date: 2008-06-20
Great idea, bad execution
Exactly the device I needed and longed for. Unfortunately, while it worked for approximately 10 minutes, it soon shorted out or otherwise failed. All I have now is a paperweight whose LED flashes blue and red and refuses to power up any drive.

Rating:
Date: 2008-06-08
A Geek's Friend
If you're like me and have a plethora of homeless drives laying around, than this is for you. Drives are getting bigger and bigger while simultaneously decreasing in price. This usually results in keeping the biggest and best setups as your main stay backup external storage volumes. What you end up with after all this upgrading, even if its not so frequent (as in once a year), is drives without a use. Now it would be really wasteful to buy a bunch of extra external cases just to keep all these unused drives in. So this dock makes all those unused drives very useful again, without filling your wall up with warts or your USB slots with endless external drives.

This product is not a Thermaltake product as such, it's just rebadged by them. I would have hoped they would have opted to use the more versatile edition which included USB 1.1/2.0 FireWire 400/800 and eSATA, however I imagine they went this route to keep the cost down, as not to many people need the speed of those other faster interfaces. All in all this product is solid, even though its made from plastic its well weighted and doesn't walk or shutter as the drive is in use (even with a 10,000 rpm Raptor drive inserted). The vertical placement of the drive seems to perform well in both allowing gravity to "seat" the drive in place as well as allow for adequate cooling. I would however not recommend you leave a "docked" drive always on as it would not be wise without some sort of external cooling especially when placed on an electronically cluttered desk.

The dock serves more as a quick backup tool and allows for convenient incremental storage of critical files, which can then be ejected and stored in a small safe for fire/water protection or in a closet, so as to not be physically connected to the machine 100% percent of the time. Its peace of mind for your photos/videos or other family files that insurance can't pay for.

I own two of these docks and have to say that buying this has made my backup regiment a hole lot more viable. Plus who really wants a desktop cluttered with a bunch of external drives when all you have to do is keep naked drives in a drawer/safe with labels taped onto them for offline backup.

This dock is so versatile that I was able to use it to recover the game saves on an Xbox 360 that failed due to dreaded "ring of red lights" hardware failure. This is important to note, as this dock was made to handle both full desktop sized 3.5 inch drives as well as the notebook 2.5 inch drives, which the Xbox 360 uses.

The only possible weakness of this dock is static discharge, as you are handling the drive without any kind of shielding or covering for the exposed electronics its attached board. To alleviate the risk of possible damage to the drive from static, I'll generally grasp an exposed metal section of my machine prior to attempting to handle a drive to discharge any static I might be carrying. It would also be wise to avoid grasping the drive by its electronics board directly instead holding it by its edges as you would a deck of cards.

In conclusion I would have to say this is a great product at a great price. And it will give a home to all those drives you thought you were going to have to destroy or sell on eBay.

Rating:
Date: 2008-05-31
Convenient Features
This docking station is plug-and-play without any software required. The hot swap feature is great. The only thing I wish it included is a Firewire port for target start-up disk in Mac OSX.

Rating:
Date: 2008-05-14
Excellence
Great idea, perfect execution. This product deserves 5 stars. No more complex to operate then plugging in a any USB drive. A new use for the SATA drives that I have laying around. Now I don't need a case for each of them. Connect and release of drive were both very easy. Worked on XP and Vista for me. Data transfer rates were very good. I can't think of any thing they need to change or improve.

Rating:
Date: 2008-04-28
Wow, what can I say, Just clearly awsome.
OK. Since I bought my first external hard drive like 6 years ago, there were quite a lot of changes in this industry. First, they made cases with plastic which didn't consider anything about cooling, and then went to aluminum and all those stuff.

There were hard disk enclosures with fans. The best one I used so far is "Thermaltake N0012USU Max 4 Active Cooling 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure by Thermaltake" Because of it's huge fan, the hard drive keeps cool and safe from data failure.

However, I wasn't able to find a good, price effective system which is able to hot-swap hard drives easily. Since I increased my number of hard drives to 3 (3 x 320GB), I thought having multiple hard drive cases is a waste. And I found this product.

Before I bought the product, I wondered if the cooling aspect of this device is good enough, the answer after I used it was "YES". As long as the room temperature is nice, the hard drive will generally keep a good temperature while it works. Of course, when the room is hot as 90 degrees or so, now that is kind of harmful. (NOT sure, I'm just a geek who's been around computers since 1994)

If you are looking for a hot-swappable product with USB connection, this product is recommended. However, if you want a product with high-cooling abilities and e-sata connection, use "Thermaltake N0012USU Max 4 Active Cooling 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure by Thermaltake"

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