Thermaltake BlacX SE USB Hard Drive Dock Review

Good Looks & Fast Drive Hot-swaps
The Thermaltake BlacX SE USB hard drive dock comes well packaged against any shipping damage with all parts individually wrapped in poly-foam sheets. It's sleek black ABS Plastic shell doesn't look out of place next to an all-black desktop layout and the unit weighs in quite heftily at 1.75 lbs to make sure it stays put.

Removing and adding hard drives is an quick process, which takes under a minute with an easy to press release button located on the side of the BlacX SE docking station. Thermaltake's patented release system not only unlocks the hard drive mechanically from the docking station, but simultaneously ejects the drive up slightly so you can remove the plastic shroud covering the drive and the hard drive itself without applying too much force to the hard drive or docking station.

The Thermaltake USB hard drive dock - front and back.

The hard drive slot and the release mechanism.

The internals of the docking station features a spring-loaded hard drive guide rail to ensure that your 2.5" or 3.5" correctly mounts on the internal SATA connector. The hard drive fits quite snug, and there is little room for movement once the drive is securely fit and accessible in the operating system. Once the drive is secured in the unit with the plastic shroud snapped back in place, the BlacX SE docking station must be powered on via the power button located at the back of the unit.

Not much to see on the back of the Thermaltake dock... just a USB, DC-in and a power switch.

Two issues of consideration are the plastic shroud fitted to the BlacX which can also be easily removed from the BlacX SE. Once the hard drive it secured in the BlacX, the plastic shroud only covers the front of the 3.5" hard drive, thereby leaving half of the back hard drive electronics exposed to potential EMI from other electronic devices or other contaminants. For those of you who archive data and favor data integrity this could be a sore point since there is a potential for any EMI emitting devices to corrupt your data on the hard drive. Ideally Thermaltake would have adopted a complete metal shroud to eliminate any potential EMI issues.

The other issue with the BlacX SE is that it allows users to hot-swap hard drives in and out of the unit even while powered on, which can be disheartening at times when the internal hard drive platters are still spinning away and the centrifugal force of the platters still running forces you to swing the drive around your computer like a madman. Ideally Thermaltake would have figured out a way to command the drive to spin-down completely before allowing users to pry it from the docking station. In the hands of an novice user the BlacX SE could certainly do some permanent damage to either the read/write head or platters of the hard drive.

Apart from these two issues the BlacX SE unit itself is built fairly well and should be able to accept any moderate abuse on the typical desktop environment. We managed to drop the unit once during handling from approximately a 1 meter height onto a hard-wood floor, through no fault of the BlacX SE unit, without causing any parts to fall off or the unit to fail to function. The only thing we were unable to test with accuracy were the internal SATA ports for the BlacX SE unit to which Thermaltake doesn't supply any statistics on endurance ratings for insertions/removals. Given the fairly rugged design of the SATA plug this is not something we would be overly worried about since the connector is naturally keyed to prevent incorrect installation of hard drives and can usually withstand a couple of hundred thousand insertions/removals by default.

USB Hub for De-cluttering Desktops
The front is populated with 4 high-speed USB 2.0 ports capable of accommodating either low-/full-/high-speed USB devices. The choice of power supply does make one wonder as why only a 2 Ampere rated power supply was selected to power 4 USB ports since the USB specification allows USB devices to draw up to 500mA per USB port which equates to a 2 Ampere current draw once 4 Universal Serial Bus powered devices are attached leaving no power remaining to power the hard drive itself. While the majority of users would most likely never use 4 USB devices requiring the full 500mA per USB device in their life-time this could be a potential issue for some users.

4 evenly spaced USB ports along with 2 activity LEDs.

With the hard drive in operation you can also easily access the front USB ports for hot-swapping flash drives, mice, keyboards and more. Unfortunately the USB hub does require the BlacX SE power to be turned on, even without a hard drive docked. Thankfully the BlacX SE does fully support hot-swapping docked hard drives while USB devices attached to the integrated USB hub are in operation. And for those technical-minded folks, the SATA to USB controller is supplied by Feiya Technology Corporation while the USB Hub components are supplied by Genesys Logic, Inc.

No additional driver CDs or applications come with the BlacX SE and no drivers are required for the supported operating systems. Your hard drive will automatically be mounted in the relevant operating system file browser and ready for you to use in seconds.

Benchmark & Performance Analysis
We tested the docking station with USB Command Verifier to evaluate the devices compliance with the USB specification for both USB hubs and USB Mass Storage Class. The docking station passed both Chapter 9 and USB Hub tests with flying colors so we would expect no compatibility issues to plague this product when used under different USB host controllers adhering to the specification.

For benchmark testing SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage benchmark was used for synthetic benchmark results and Microsofts Robocopy for a real-world benchmark result. Initially we used a 3.5" Western Digital Caviar WD2000JD 200GB but unfortunately this failed enumeration in the Operating System. For some reason the BlacX SATA to USB controller did not want to recognize the drive which may point to some 3.5" hard drive geometry / controller incompatibilities. Finally, we settled on a 3.5" Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB hard drive (SATA300 mode) and formatted with an NTFS file system for our standard benchmark and tested with 2 different scenarios.

One scenario, using SiSoft Sandra 2009, included no additional USB devices attached to the docking station determine the maximum throughput on both read and write operations in ideal conditions to the hard drive. For our second scenario with the same test suite we then attached one Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB flash drive, one Logitech Illuminated keyboard and one Logitech G9 mouse to the integrated USB hub. The flash drive was playing a fairly typical 640x352 formatted XviD compressed movie trailer and both mouse and keyboard were heavily in use during the SiSoft Sandra benchmark to gauge the integrated USB hubs ability to handle simple USB Interrupt and Bulk based traffic while accessing the hard drive and determine the effect this would have on the hard drives throughput in a typical day-to-day scenario.

With no additional USB devices attached, the BlacX SE achieved a maximum read performance of 23.4MB/s and a maximum write performance of 21.3MB/s with a 7200-rpm SATA300 hard drive. The lower performance can be accosted to the benchmark system running Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, known to reduce USB performance, and the use of a Genesys Logic USB hub to support the embedded SATA to USB microprocessor which adds protocol latency to the round-trip and thus results in lower performance.

The addition of USB devices and movie playback from a flash drive will of course add some additional USB protocol interference in terms of raw performance for the hard drive but the drop in performance was never tragic enough to cause the drive to lose its enumeration in the operating system or any cause any attached USB devices to fail in operation. With USB devices in operation the maximum performance dropped slightly to 17.07MegaBytes/second for both read and write operations.

Using Robocopy for real-world performance testing I copied a 640 MB ISO file to and from the docked 3.5" hard drive with no other USB devices attached. Robocopy managed to obtain 18.24 MB/second write and 23.20 MB/s read speeds which closely matches the SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage benchmark results.

While the results are nowhere near the theoretical data rates of the USB 2.0 specification, there are many variables to consider when using external hard drive enclosures that can affect the overall available bandwidth on both an electrical and USB protocol level and the BlacX SE does perform well given the bandwidth limitations imposed by the USB specification. For users looking for faster performance I would recommend to wait for a follow-up model with eSATA functionality to really take advantage of adding a 7200rpm 3.5" or 2.5" hard drive externally via a hard drive docking station.

Recap
Considering the price of a 250GB 2.5" or 3.5" hard drive the Thermaltake BlacX SE hard drive docking station is hard not to recommend. Sure you can buy cheap SATA or IDE to USB adapters on eBay but often those come with poor build quality. The BlacX SE is a great product for people looking to add cheap 3.5" or 2.5" hard drives to their desktop backup / archiving solution and the build quality of the hardware itself is great. The inclusion of a USB hub to the unit should also help reduce some of that cable-clutter on your desktop and presents a nice feature to separate it from the other external hard drive enclosures and docking stations available on the market.