New Toy-Thermaltake BlacX Duet eSATA Dual Dock

Posted by JD 12/29/2010 at 07:45

I received a Thermaltake BlacX Duet eSATA USB Dual Hard Drives Docking Station for Xmas. I’d asked for it since almost no non-nerd would have known what it was. Today was the first day that I got a chance to plug this baby in.

Thermaltake Dual eSATA Dock

First Impressions

  1. No drivers needed. Just connected it via eSATA and it worked on Win7 x64 Home Premium. Don’t know if it will work that easily for Linux.
  2. Dual docks look cool
  3. Supports 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives – either size in either dock
  4. Flashing blue LEDs show drive activity.
  5. FAST – as fast as an internal drive; in fact, the drive letters show up listed as internal drives inside Windows Explorer
  6. Quiet – my laptop fan was making more noise than this dock with a WD 320GB Blue 2.5" drive moving 14GB of data around.
  7. FAST – did I mention how fast is was? I moved 14GB of data off the drive, over a GigE network connection to a file server in about a minute. eSATA rocks! Wish I would have timed it so know how quick it really was. I didn’t use the USB connection, obviously.
  8. No reboot needed on a Dell 1565 laptop with combo-eSATA/USB ports. Connected all the cables up to the Win7 HP x64 laptop and pressed the button on top of the dock to provide power. Windows7 made that noise showing a new drive had been found and mounted it. There are 3 FAT32/NTFS partitions on the drive that I connected. All were seen and mounted. No reboot needed … so far.
  9. SATA drives only – this device doesn’t know anything about IDE, which can be an issue for older drives. I have a few 13GB – 300GB IDE drives that are still holding data around here.

Now I just need to go thru all my old drives and find which should be DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) and which need to be cherished.

So, I’d like to dismount the drives and looked for an eject option but didn’t find it. I guess I’ll just push the power-LED to disconnect the single drive. Yep, that worked. So did simply grabbing the drive and pulling it out. No BSOD seen, which is always appreciated. There is a MUI language setting module error, every time it is connected to the system. I guess it doesn’t like the default language for the file system since it was originally a WinVista HDD. I honestly do not know if this is an issue to be worried about or not. There doesn’t appear to be problem however.

It is time to shutdown the virtual machines that I’m running, un-mount the TrueCrypt partition and perform a backup of the entire encrypted partition to the external disk.

Here’s another review about the Thermaltake BlacX Duet eSATA Dual Dock with lots of pictures.

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