19 Apr 10 Cool Hard Drive

A few days ago, I purchased a new, twin, BlackX Sata Hard Drive docking station.

They’re really useful.

I didn’t want to get an external drive in a case, because I’d stripped down some computers, and had these perfectly working Sata drives from them. I was looking to buy a standard enclosure, but then I’d really need to buy one for the drives that I had, which would work out at over a hundred bucks, assuming that each enclosure was around $25 – $30.

Then I saw the BlacX. The single slot USB version was on sale for $34.99, and I would only need to buy one.  I went ahead and I’ve been happy with its performance. I can hot-swap hard drives from the dock (assuming you’re not in the middle of writing data of course).

Now, I can have a hard drive for video, one for music, one for documents and so on.

So, when I needed to upgrade my music library drive, as my old 500GB one was rapidly filling up (I’ve digitized, and bought digital music for some years now), I decided to go for a similar solution.

This time I purchased a twin slot dock, that will work with both USB and eSATA connections. I don’t as yet have any computers with eSATA but I almost certainly will on the next upgrade. The only thing you need to watch for when using eSATA, is that your computer is equipped with a Port Multiplier or your system will only see one drive and not two.

There is no such restriction with USB.

I also bought a 1TB Western Digital ‘Green’ Drive. It’s supposed to use less energy and more to the point, it was over $20 cheaper that the ‘regular’ ones.

It seems to work fine, and is speedy enough too.

One thing I did notice though. The two older Western Digital drives that I have in the twin dock (they’re both 320GB each), are too hot to touch for long. The new 1TB Green Drive, is quite cool in comparison, and I could put my hand on it, and leave it there.

I would assume that this could help the drive electronics to last longer, as heat is certainly no friend of such equipment.

All in all though, I’m pleased with the purchase. A twin dock with 1TB drive for $130, with plenty of room for expansion in the future.

Tags: 1tb, digital music, drive electronics, esata, hard drive, hard drives, multiplier, music library, western digital