Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Thermaltake BlacX 5G is the next step in the evolution of a great product as it supports both the USB 3 and USB 2 standard. Of course, though, you will have to have a motherboard that supports USB 3 to get the greatest performance out the unit, but the nice thing is that it will function on a USB 2 controller or acquire a USB 3 PCIE card which is available as well.

Having a hard drive dock can be a life saver in many situations when you need to get data off a drive quickly. Having a dock like the Thermaltake BlacX-5g that supports USB 3 makes it even quicker to get that data. Disk Cloning applications like Acronis True Image 2010 support USB 3.0 as well, so the process of making clones or moving a currently installed OS to a larger drive will also take a lot less time.

I have a few other words of advice when using this dock, though. When ejecting the drive out of the BlacX do so carefully. Also I would power the unit down for about 15 seconds which should allow for everything to spin down before ejecting. Also, when inserting the drive dont force it in as it could easily break the connectors either in the dock or on the drive or, even worse, on both. The ejection mechanism, though, is well thought out as seen below:

When you push the ejection button a lever gently lifts the drive out of the dock at both the SATA connector plate and at the rear of the drive. This lowers the chance of a breakage and is a feature that makes this product stand out!

This unit though is a dream come true for folks that want to set up a rotating drive back up scheme. You could backup to a drive for two weeks and then swap out the drive with a second drive while placing the first drive in a secure place. This would allow you to easily set up a disaster recovery plan for a home server without having to use a cloud based service if you so desired.

Supporting both 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives also gives the BlacX 5g versatility in handling all sorts of different drives. A good use for the 2.5 inch capability could be trying to recover data from a dead laptop when the aforementioned laptop is still functional.

A quick look online puts the lowest price for the Thermaltake BlacX 5g is $47.94 with shipping. Thermaltake again brings a great product to the field with a great price point!

Legit Bottom Line: The Thermaltake BlacX 5g offers great performance and makes it easy to add an additional hard drive. Also, by supporting USB 3 the BlacX 5G will only get better when USB 3 becomes more wide spread. Thermaltake has yet again hit the mark with this product!