Thermaltake BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station Review

Installation & Testing
So how exactly are we going to test the BlacX 5G?  Well luckily I had an original BlacX sitting around so why not test USB 2.0 vs. USB 3.0?  Seems like a good idea right?  The drive we will be using for testing is the recently reviewed Patriot Inferno 120GB solid state drive.  Our test system will be comprised of an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme, Gigabyte X58A-UD5 motherboard and 6GB of OCZ DDR3 memory.

Thermaltake BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station Thermaltake BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station

Since we are only testing the dock not the hard drive we are not going to go that in-depth with everything just the normal HDTune benchmarks.  Let’s first start with the USB 2.0 test with the original BlacX.

usb2 read

usb2 write

As you can see the speed is capped by the available bandwidth of the USB 2.0 connection.  Let’s try USB 3.0 with the BlacX 5G.

usb3 read

usb3 write

WOW now there is a huge difference there!  And if you take a look at our review of the Patriot Inferno 120GB solid state drive you can see the SATA connection speeds are very close to our USB 3.0 speeds here!  Here is a graph showing USB 2.0 vs. USB 3.0.

usb graph

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