[H]ardOCP:

We have touched on these units in the past, namely the Thermaltake BlacX, and the only gripe back then was that the product did not utilize a faster bus technology, namely SATA. Vantec has had a product out for a while now called the NexStar Hard Drive Dock and I have been using one on my personal system and on our test bench configurations for months. It is a hell of a nice product. Fast as any SATA II drive’s bus on your system as long as you have an eSATA port to plug it into, which almost all motherboards have now days, if not for years already. Take a quick look below:



My only complaint that is when you first plug it in and turn it on, it will fully lock my Vista 64-bit system for about 2 minutes while the OS rediscovers the drive controllers. Once you are past the first startup with it, your system will hang for a few seconds when you turn it on while the hard drive spins up.



I have used the NexStar for backing up Windows installs on the fly, moving from machine to machine. What the NexStar makes extremely convenient is grabbing data off of a hard drive that happens to not be in a system. Slap it in the dock, and bam! You have access to your data (or anyone else’s). And with the SATA bus you have access to very large files quickly as well. The NexStar HD Dock is good hardware, if you need one, you probably already knew it before you got this far reading.



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