Just picked up the BlackX SATA HDD eSATA & USB docking station made by Thermaltake (P/N:ST0005U). I needed something to backup my photos and videos and wasn’t too happy about all the external drive bays I had piling up around me. I was afraid one day they would all collapse and crush me under their weight. The hard drive dock allows you to take SATA drives up to 1TB and simply swap them in and out. No more need for external drive bays. This baby supports all 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA HDD’s, connects via USB 2.0 (up to 480Mbps) or eSATA I/II (up to 3Gbps), is both Windows (even Vista) and Mac OS compatible and is so simple to use.
I set mine up using the eSATA connection using the external eSATA blade that came with my motherboard. For this you basically install the blade in an emty slot in your case, connect a SATA cable from it to your motherboard as well as a power connector and you are good to go. A cable then runs from the blade up to your dock. There is also an AC power plug that you need to plug in as well.
The dock itself feels pretty solid. I was worried that it would be light and that the hard drive would tend to want to fall over or be unstable. But the base is solid with decent weight to it and I don’t see how it would tip over without getting hit pretty hard. There are small rubber feet on the base that keep it from sliding around as well. On the top is the slot to insert the hard drive, the drive ejection button and a circular light that is blue when on and transitions to red when accessing the drive. At the back of the dock is where the eSata and USB cables connect as well as the power button.
Installing the hard drive is fairly easy. I am using Windows XP so these instructions are for Windows but this dock is also compatible with Mac OS although you will need to use a version post 9.2 since earlier versions do not support partition creation for external hard drives. First insert the hard drive into the drive slot of the dock. I use Western Digital WD10EADS 1.0TB SATA drives with 32MB cache. I’ve been pretty happy with them so far. After inseting the hard drive power on the dock. The OS will recognize the new hardware and install the drivers automatically. If it doesn’t recognize the dock you might try going into device manager and initiating a manual “scan for for hardware changes”. Next you will need to initialize the new disk. Right click on “My Computer” and choose “Manage”. Under Storage > Disk Management right click on the new disk and choose initialize. It may also automatically come up with a wizard for installing the drive as it did in my case. After the drive is initialized right click on the new drive in Disk Management and choose “New Partition”. Follow the wizard for creating a new partition and format the drive with NTFS (or FAT32). That’s all there is to it. Your drive should now be available to start storing all those photos and videos.
Now there are a few things that I have noticed that have given me a few problems. The first is when using the dock with more than one drive. I’ve noticed that when I pop one drive out and insert another that Windows won’t always recognize the drive. It doesn’t just pop up in Windows Explorer as one would hope and expect. I’ve had to force it’s detection by going into Computer Management, right click on Disk Management and choose “Rescan Disks” in order for it to show up. It’s a few extra steps that shouldn’t be needed and I’m not sure whether this is a dock issue or a Windows issue.
The dock was about $40 and the WD drives were $89 each. Pretty cheap way to have 2TB of storage. I recommend it despite some lingering issues with drives not showing up after power up.
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