Thermaltake Shows Off USB 3.0 BlacX Hard Drive Dock

Of little surprise I’m sure, USB 3.0 devices were all over CES this year. So much so, that it was just plain difficult to keep track of them all. You can expect us to be posting reviews of many of them in the months to come, from flash-based drives to external enclosures, as there’s going to be an obvious demand for information on which products rock, and which could be better.

I’m willing to bet that one of the better is Thermaltake’s BlacX hard drive dock. Not an enclosure, the BlacX allows you to plug in a S-ATA drive, 2.5″ or 3.5″, and immediately read and write to it on your PC. It’s like a thumb drive, but this method gives you far more storage to deal with, and with the help of USB 3.0, you can get the far improved performance as well.

Thermaltake had the latest dock on display, and set it beside the older USB 2.0 version. Each one of these docks had a Patriot 128GB SSD plugged in, and Thermaltake was giving real-world performance examples to prove just how worthy USB 3.0 is. When copying the same folder to each drive, the process took just over 2.5x times longer on the USB 2.0 device.

That’s not quite the 10x USB speed you’d expect to see, given that’s the improvement we were promised, but like most theoretical limits, there’s a lot that the performance is dependant on. In this case, there were many files in this folder, slowing things down. The USB 3.0 connection went about 30MB/s, while the USB 2.0 was stuck at around 12MB/s.

The BlacX USB 3.0 will become available within the next few months, and the cost shouldn’t be much different than the USB 2.0 model, at around ~$35.