One thing that I didn’t really fall in love with was the fact that the back of the drive and its sensitive components were all exposed. I can already see butterfingers splashing his/her coffee or water onto the back of the drive as it’s copying an important file. Thermaltake does have a product (BlacX SE part no: N0029USU) with a covered back, but it isn’t as simple as this product. If Thermaltake can just cover up the back side with an extension, they’d be good to go.
The backside of the dock is where you will find the power connector, USB, and main power button. Missing are eSATA and Firewire connections and I feel that without them, it really limits the product’s potential. Luckily, Thermaltake did take that to heart and quietly introduced an eSata capable version known as the ST0005U. Still no covered backside though.
Finally, the ejection button works extremely well. The plastic chosen by Thermaltake is very durable and the drive ejection mechanism worked well all hundred times that IÂ attempted to try and defeat it. Drives popped out and inserted with no problems though I do have to note that a certain level of finger pressure is required and you have to push straight down on it as it doesn’t work as well pushing the button down on an angle.
To the right side of the eject button, you’ll see an indicator for power and drive activity. Blue means power on and red means clickety clicking of the hard drive. I kept trying to push it down because it looked like a button. Maybe in a future revision, they can make it touch sensitive, eliminating the need to switch the dock on from the back.
Setup and Installation
As you may have guessed, setup was a breeze. All you need to do is plugin the power and USB cable, connect it to a computer, drop in a hard drive and hit the power button.
One thing that we did notice is that the opening is built for standard sized 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch hard drives. If you have a single platter drive like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB hard drive or a slimmer 2.5 inch hard drive, you might notice a gap between the front of the drive and the dock. Our Seagate 250 GB drive was a bit wobbly in the slot compared to the non-wobbly Samsung 250 GB drive. During hevy operation, you can sort of see the drive visibly move in the slack space, which could possibly lead to the connector loosening over time.
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