Installation
Very easy. Just plug all the cables in. Drop the drive in. It just works, on a Mac that is. I didn’t really look at the instructions.
Observations
- 3.5″ drives slide in easily. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to go off track and not hook up right.
- Ejecting 3.5″ drives require a little more than just pressing the eject button. You should probably pull on the drive too. (I wonder if that was in the instructions.)
- Ejecting 2.5″ drives seem to get stuck a little. It just might be the drive I was using.
- The flap which covers the drive slot seems a little flimsy.
- The drive light on the top of the Blac X consists of two lights: a blue power light, and a red drive activity light.
- I’m having an issue when unmounting a 2.5″ drive then remounting it. Blac X doesn’t seem to recognize the drive. I have to turn the Blac X off then back on for it to work.
- It allows deep sleep like so many USB devices do!
- Does not prevent automatic sleep like so many USB devices do!
I’ve been looking for the perfect solution to back up my life, basically all the files on my computer. I wanted something that was inexpensive, easy to use, and reliable. I was backing stuff up on CD, that got old fast. I tried DVDs, but I heard the dyes are unstable. Then I heard a suggestion of just saving it on hard drives. Ok, why not?
I bought one of these. The Seritek seemed like a good solution at the time. I was taking advantage of the speed and technology of SATA drives. Whenever I bought a new hard drive for my PowerMac, I could stick the old drive in a tray and use it in this enclosure. External SATA is nice, but it just doesn’t work like a Firewire drive. It didn’t take long before I got super annoyed by these stupid trays. I learned later that there were enclosures out there that don’t require trays. Cooldrives has a few, but I was told the fans would not turn off when the computer is put to sleep. Ditto for the Seritek. That was very annoying to me also. Drobo was another drive enclosure I considered and still am. But it does so much more which comes at a cost, a cost of half a G! This leads me to the Blac X (finally, huh?)
A couple of weeks ago, I was perusing my local Fry’s looking for some kind of hard drive solution. Something caught my eye: a tiny little black box with a picture of bare hard drive plugged into some kind of enclosure like a video game cartridge. Ooh, what’s this? It takes SATA drives, 2.5″ and 3.5″. Nice. USB? Rip off! How much was this badboy? $39.95. Ooh, maybe not a rip off. Is it any good? I pulled out my iPhone and quickly searched the web for reviews just like in the commercials. Ahh, here’s one.. skipped to the conclusion section. Thumbs up. It’s mine!
Part 2 here.
What is it about this little black box that makes me want it so badly?
In a nutshell, a Drobo is a super easy proprietary redundant RAID-like hard drive enclosure that allows you to almost infinitely upgrade the drives inside. What is especially awesome other than its good looks is you don’t need to buy weird drive trays that aren’t available at a local Fry’s. All you do is just slide the bare drives into one of its four slots. There are little lights on the front that tell you when you’re running out of room or when a drive goes bad. You can mix and match drive makes and sizes. When the Drobo does runs out of room, just buy the big SATA drive you found on sale and replace the smallest drive. It then automatically prepares the drive. No down time, no fuss.
