Thermaltake Blacx Duet 5G Mac OS 10

As you can see there was a slight bottleneck when we compare this to our previous transfer of 220MBs PC to BlacX.

Since I no longer have to fiddle around mounting drives in my system and can simply slap a drive in a dock and pull the data I need and move on with my day, it saves me a great deal of time.

The Duet is comprised of a plastic body with an internal weight to hold the dock steady, while youre slamming drives in and out of the system - and that goes to say it does support hot swapping.

The internal SATA ports support a generation three configuration, but are also backwards compatible with SATA and SATA II drives.

Thermaltake Blacx Duet 5G Mac OS 10

As far as OS compatibility the BlacX Duet 5G supports Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 along with Mac OS 10.

The BlacX Duet 5G shares many of its characteristics with its little brother, the single bay BlacX 5G.

Everything from the shape and choice materials have stayed the same between units, but there are some obvious differences, such as the power button and internal PCB, which we will touch on shortly.

The top of the dock has a slight brushed appearance brought on by the slice of aluminium Thermaltake has placed here.

As you will notice the power switch incorporates two LEDs, both of which are blue - one indicating the unit is switched on and the other for activity.

To the right there are also two levers for ejecting your drives.

The back of the dock is rather simple, housing a power input and USB 3.0 connection.

The scope of delivery for the BlacX Duet 5G includes the power adapter and USB 3.0 cable along with a warranty booklet and user guide.

We also found two rubber drive covers in the box to combat drive acoustics.

The meat and beans of the BlacX Duet 5G all comes down to the PCB as it will determine how fast this dock really is.

Above, as you can see, the controller used in this dock is the JMicron JMS551, a SATA III to USB 3.0 bridge controller that operates on the Bulk Only Transport specification - no UASP support.

Choosing the proper benchmarks to be used in a review can be, at times, a hassle.

While I would love to please all of you and run every possible benchmark on these enclosures, it would be at the very least time consuming.

With that said I have chosen some of the more popular, and widely available benchmarks.

All testing is run in the same order on every enclosure and that is the order you see it here in this review.

Drives used in this review are a pair of very capable Corsair Neutron SSDs.

Using ATTO we see the BlacX Duet 5G top out at 267MBs read and 263MBs write.

Our Z77 test motherboard has seen numbers close to 500MBs on USB 3.0 previously, and as such, we know that this is where the BlacX electronics top out in the Duet 5G model.

CrystalDiskMark, as expected, showed similar numbers in sequential read and write.QD32 results were similar to what Ive seen from previous reviews at 15MBs read and 27MBs write.

Moving over to DiskBench for some real-world testing we see the BlacX Duet 5G held on with 220MBs transferring our test data folder.

As this unit is a dock and supports no RAID features, I thought it would be nice to see how the unit does while transferring data drive to drive both installed in the BlacX.

Thermaltake Blacx Duet 5G Driver