Introduction

As an owner of two fresh new 500 Gigabyte HDDs, At the time I was lacking a second SATA cable to hook up the second drive, so I found this a perfect opportunity to try out the ThermalTake BlacX Hard Disk Drive Dock. ThermalTake has been manufacturer of reliable case equipment for years.

Packaging

The dock, as expected, came in a shrink-wrapped retail box. The unit was bubble wrapped inside, and came with an AC power adapter and USB cable. There was also a small brochure inside describing basic installation.

Form Factor

The unit is black plastic and pretty light. It is small enough not to intrude on desk space yet wide enough to offer stability to a docked 3.5" drive. Its look is appealing, although the image of having an upright drive mounted in it may seem less so to a non-computer junkie like myself. The rear of the unit houses the USB port, AC port, and the power button. The button is pushable and associable by touch to see whether it is on or off (if it's off it sticks out more). This is pretty unnecessary, though, as the top of the unit has a pair of lights, disguised as a single light. The left side, a blue light, indicates the power is on (regardless of hard drive connectivity). The right side, is a red activity light. The AC adapter is rather large, however, and will almost definitely hog space on your power strip. The eject button is conveniently placed though is slightly awkward to press with one finger.

Usage

I plugged in the device and powered it on: The dock claims to have hot swappable capability, so I may insert and remove drives at my leisure (given I've unmounted them, of course). Linux detected the device as a USB Mass Storage in about five seconds. As with any normal mass storage device, I could open and copy files between it and my other drives. I assume windows would behave identically with regards to a normal mass storage device.