Page 2: Testing, Conclusion
Testing:
As past reviews have shown, USB2 enclosures all tap out at the same throughput as long as the drive supplying the data is fast enough. Not surprisingly, the BlacX saturated the USB2 data bus and provided as much data through it as it could. If you buy a USB2 external hard drive enclosure, prepare to be limited by the throughput of USB2. Once USB3 comes out, this should change. This is one of the reasons that eSATA has been coming out in force. There is a newer model of the BlacX that includes eSATA support (for a higher price) so plan on picking that one up if you are in need of a high rate of data transfer.
The unit is hot swappable. You don't need to turn the power off on the unit to remove it even though you probably will to feel safer. The serial ATA specification has built in hot swap functionality (you can thank the connections for that).
The Concept:
The BlacX brings something fairly unique to the computer world that I haven't seen before. You can now use a hard drive as a removable physical medium to store data. Hard drives are VERY cheap for the data size they offer. Move over Blu-ray, this is how people will start storing data for backup purposes and it is already happening. Optical disk technology cannot keep up with hard drive space and products like this make backing up very simple. You can keep multiple independent backups on different hard drives for extra redundancy. The concept is great and tape libraries should be a thing of the past with technologies like this.
Conclusion:
The Thermaltake BlacX is hovering around the $40 mark as shown below. The price is good for a rather unique product and one that allows easy backing up of a load of data. The point of this unit is to get people in the habit of really taking care of their data. Invest in this unit and get some anti-static bags for your removable hard drives. You can swap them in and out to rotate backups. Hard drives are the new tape storage!
Since this unit doesn't have eSATA, you might be thinking of just buying the one with eSATA. I agree with you, but this unit is less expensive and some people don't have that much data to transfer. Many computers don't even have any eSATA ports so you might be out of luck on that end, but this unit has you covered. It's a good concept and the unit performs as expected. Thermaltake made a winner with this one.
I'd like to thank Ramsom at Thermaltake for making this review possible.
As past reviews have shown, USB2 enclosures all tap out at the same throughput as long as the drive supplying the data is fast enough. Not surprisingly, the BlacX saturated the USB2 data bus and provided as much data through it as it could. If you buy a USB2 external hard drive enclosure, prepare to be limited by the throughput of USB2. Once USB3 comes out, this should change. This is one of the reasons that eSATA has been coming out in force. There is a newer model of the BlacX that includes eSATA support (for a higher price) so plan on picking that one up if you are in need of a high rate of data transfer.
The unit is hot swappable. You don't need to turn the power off on the unit to remove it even though you probably will to feel safer. The serial ATA specification has built in hot swap functionality (you can thank the connections for that).
The Concept:
The BlacX brings something fairly unique to the computer world that I haven't seen before. You can now use a hard drive as a removable physical medium to store data. Hard drives are VERY cheap for the data size they offer. Move over Blu-ray, this is how people will start storing data for backup purposes and it is already happening. Optical disk technology cannot keep up with hard drive space and products like this make backing up very simple. You can keep multiple independent backups on different hard drives for extra redundancy. The concept is great and tape libraries should be a thing of the past with technologies like this.
Conclusion:
The Thermaltake BlacX is hovering around the $40 mark as shown below. The price is good for a rather unique product and one that allows easy backing up of a load of data. The point of this unit is to get people in the habit of really taking care of their data. Invest in this unit and get some anti-static bags for your removable hard drives. You can swap them in and out to rotate backups. Hard drives are the new tape storage!
Since this unit doesn't have eSATA, you might be thinking of just buying the one with eSATA. I agree with you, but this unit is less expensive and some people don't have that much data to transfer. Many computers don't even have any eSATA ports so you might be out of luck on that end, but this unit has you covered. It's a good concept and the unit performs as expected. Thermaltake made a winner with this one.
I'd like to thank Ramsom at Thermaltake for making this review possible.