Thermaltake BlacX 5G ST0019U HDD Docking Station
Jan 15th, 2011 | By JaredInstallation is about as simple as you can get. The rubber protective sleeves are optional and cover the exposed portion of the drives.
Once you insert the hard drive you simply hit the power button and wait a few seconds for the OS to recognize the drive and you are ready to roll.
For testing I used a Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6.0GBs (WD6402AAEX) and an OCZ Agility 2 60GB SSD. Using Crystal Disk Mark, I benchmarked each drive in connected directly to internal SATA, docked in the BlacX 5G via USB 3.0 and for good measure also with the BlacX 5G connected via USB 2.0.
First up is the Western Digital Caviar Black. While the drive utilizes a SATA 6.0 GBs interface, it will never come near the bandwidth limit of that specification so this is more a test of the USB 3.0 connection.
As you can see here the BlacX 5G while connected to a USB 3.0 port matches the performance of the drive as if it were connected directly to a SATA port. Also you can clearly see the giant advantage that USB 3.0 has over the older 2.0 specification as we see nearly triple the bandwidth.
Next up was dropping the OCZ Agility 2 60GB SSD in the BlacX 5G.
Results here were interesting as the write speeds of the BlacX 5G matches the performance of a straight SATA connection however the 512k and sequential read results fall behind. It’s pretty impressive to have this performance from a handy hard drive dock that is no longer hamstringed by the limited bandwidth of USB 2.0.