These last few weeks I’ve been dealing with larger and larger sets of data that I would need to download to my PC to work on. When working with multiple copies of data that are 10-20 GBs each, it started to fill up my two HDDs very quickly. I decided I need to go buy a new hard drive to give me plenty of room. The question was “internal” or “external” and how big.
I decided to go with a 1 TB drive. Then I had to decide if I wanted to put it inside my PC (I can fit 4 HDDs, so no problem) or get an external. The biggest thing I loathe about external hard drives is the slow transfer speed over USB. I like the convenience of smaller external drives that don’t require an external power source. I own a few smaller external hard drives, but they aren’t good for my 60GB backups.
This is where my new toy comes in: the Thermaltake BlacX. Its basically a docking station for any 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA hard drive. So now instead of swapping around cords and such, I have my docking station hooked up via an eSATA connection. So I can hot swap archive hard drives, keep a 300Gb/s transfer speed, and have the convenience of no swapping cables.
So far it as been really great. It also supports a USB 2.0 connection if your PC doesn’t support eSATA. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to be able store and archive data on multiple hard drives.
Justin Carmony 