The BlacX’s retina-roasting blue power and activity LEDs aren’t quite as subdued, but they at least face up, so it’s relatively easy to avoid being blinded. Even the branding is subtle, just as long as you ignore the requisite upper-case X, which presumably denotes the Xtremeness of hard drive hot-swapping. As its name implies, the docking station is all black, which should at least be unobtrusive enough for living rooms, offices, and labs alike. Thermaltake has essentially created a new class of external storage product.Īt first glance, it’s hard to know what to make of the BlacX. Read on to see what this unique take on external storage is all about.Īlthough the BlacX may have the same basic underpinnings as standard external hard drive enclosures, their implementation in a docking station is unique. Since I always have at least a couple of desktop drives sitting around the Benchmarking Sweatshop, I couldn’t resist taking the BlacX for a spin. Instead, it’s connected to a hot-swap hard drive docking station. Except this external interface isn’t hooked up to an enclosure that’s designed to be carried around. Thermaltake is turning that formula on its ear with the BlacX, which can easily connect standard 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drives to a PC’s external expansion ports. Provide protective casing so you can move a drive around without fear of damaging it, hook that up to an interface that you can easily plug into a PC without having to dig around inside the case, and you have a finished product. The formula for a portable hard drive enclosure is a simple one, so it’s no wonder the market is flooded with clones. Some differ on whether they wrap drives in plastic or aluminum, and you can choose from a virtual rainbow of LED colors, but that’s about it. All support the same mobile or desktop drive standards, have the same rough size and shape, and offer reasonably comparable performance. When you really get down to it, there isn’t much to them, nor are there many differences between the various flavors on the market. Normally we couldn’t be less interested in external hard drive products.
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