With the plummeting prices of hard drives nowadays, it is becoming affordable to buy them. The only problem one faces at times like these is that you only have so many molex power connection on your PSU (power supply unit) to support all your hard disk drives (HDD).

While switching between hard disk drives, the BlacX SE can still be used as a powered USB hub.

And should you have that many, you would not want your HDD switched on all the time unless you need to swap HDD to access more content.

Though you can use external HDD enclosures, they are mostly for single drives and those that have multiple slots for more than one drive are very expensive. Here is where Thermaltake’s BlacX SE HDD Docking Station fills that niche.

The BlacX SE allows you to swap HDD quickly – just click on “Safely Remove Hardware” in Windows then press the eject button on the Dock and pop the next HDD in. You don’t need to power off the Dock since it is a plug-and-play device. In addition, this model has four hi-speed USB which you can use as a USB hub too.

I fiddled with the BlacX SE and found it useful as I use my 500-gigabyte (GB) Western Digitals as very large DVDs. The drives fit in the dock but not very firmly so it is a good idea to have them on a stable surface. It has a plastic “hood” which you can flip over the HDD to prevent dust from settling on the SATA connection slot when not in use.

The design is sturdy and the read speed using HD Tach’s benchmark is 27.9 megabytes per second (MBps) while using 22 per cent of the central processing unit and random access time of 13 milliseconds. Whereas a cheap IDE/SATA to USB converter is 29.7MBps while using 15 per cent of the CPU (central processing unit) and random access time of 13.3ms. A cheap 1GB Flash Memory Stick is 9.8MBps while using 13 per cent of the CPU and a random access time of 113ms. In a self-test write of 2.38GB of data using Terra Copy, it took the BlacX SE 148 seconds to transfer the data.

If you have many HDDs and need to go through them once in a while, the BlacX SE will be very suitable. During the times when you are switching between HDDs, you can still use it as a powered USB hub.