My husband is a hard drive hoarder but it is all good 🙂 because hard drives fail and it sucks when they do. I remember several times in the past, every hard drive we put in his computer failed within a few months. What’s up with all that? Then there came the biggie. My external hard drive failed. I knew the data was still there because I could see the size used but I couldn’t access it at all. So frustrating.

What we would do with these drives is pop open our computers, actually hook it up to the computer and let it detect the drive to access and salvage the data. When DIY external drive cases came along that’s what we used. But after a while, even that was a pain in the you know where because the cases had to be opened and some of them were so tight and we have like 4 or 5 drives to go through.

Then I came across the Thermaltake BlackX. It is a hard drive dock. Instead of putting the hard drive into an enclosure and closing it in, you stick the hard drive into the slot like a toaster and wouldn’t you know it, it is as easy to use as a toaster too. It reminds me of using floppies – remember those? Yeah, except this is much larger.

I didn’t even need to load drivers – I run Windows XP. Hooked it up, popped the drive into the dock, turned it on and voila! I get the familiar drive found window just like you would if you inserted your USB drive into the computer. Neato. The dock takes 2.5 and 3.5 SATA drives. If you want to drop in another drive you press the release button and pop in the other drive.

I’ve used packaged external drives and enclosures before they all felt too hot after a short time of plugging the drive in. But I was pleasantly surprised this is not the case at all with the Thermaltake. Maybe it has to do with the drive being in an open area and thus dissipating heat better but the hard drive and the dock is always cool to the touch even when I have had it running for a whole day (or two).

Because of this dock, I was been able to hook up old hard drives easily to rescue Gigabytes of data before completely erasing the drive. I also currently use it like an external storage drive. This little dock gets my thumbs up.