Hard Drives on Sale

If you're like me and have a plethora of homeless drives laying around, than this is for you. Drives are getting bigger and bigger while simultaneously decreasing in price. This usually results in keeping the biggest and best setups as your main stay backup external storage volumes. What you end up with after all this upgrading, even if its not so frequent (as in once a year), is drives without a use. Now it would be really wasteful to buy a bunch of extra external cases just to keep all these unused drives in. So this dock makes all those unused drives very useful again, without filling your wall up with warts or your USB slots with endless external drives.

This product is not a Thermaltake product as such, it's just rebadged by them. I would have hoped they would have opted to use the more versatile edition which included USB 1.1/2.0 FireWire 400/800 and eSATA, however I imagine they went this route to keep the cost down, as not to many people need the speed of... Read more

OK. Since I bought my first external hard drive like 6 years ago, there were quite a lot of changes in this industry. First, they made cases with plastic which didn't consider anything about cooling, and then went to aluminum and all those stuff.

There were hard disk enclosures with fans. The best one I used so far is "Thermaltake N0012USU Max 4 Active Cooling 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure by Thermaltake" Because of it's huge fan, the hard drive keeps cool and safe from data failure.

However, I wasn't able to find a good, price effective system which is able to hot-swap hard drives easily. Since I increased my number of hard drives to 3 (3 x 320GB), I thought having multiple hard drive cases is a waste. And I found this product.

Before I bought the product, I wondered if the cooling aspect of this device is good enough, the answer after I used it was "YES". As long as the room temperature is nice, the hard drive will generally keep... Read more

The only beef I have with this device is that the patented connector doesn't connect very well. I tried it with both 2.5" and 3.5" drives and had the same problems with both. The hole for the drive doesn't quite fit the drive, so some fiddling is needed to get it in. In addition, making a positive connection to the cable connectors is tricky and takes more force than I really feel comfortable with on small plastic parts.

On the positive side, once the drive is in, everything works find and seems to run as fast as USB2 drives usually run. If you have the requirement to use bare drives without opening your computer, this will do the job. It is definitely more convenient than opening the case and mounting the drive. So if you need to handle multiple naked drives this may be a useful tool for you. For the average user an external drive kit might be a better choice.