Thermaltake Hard Drive Docking Station

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dslr_sc

Active member
I was wondering if anyone has tried one of those Thermaltake external hard drive docking stations for video editing. They seem to get great reviews on the web and you can get them at Best Buy. The eSATA transfer rate is 3Gbps but is this enough for HD video editing and smooth playback?

(I did a search here and one person had good things to say about these but I thought I'd post it as a separate topic.)
 
Its esata so it's not that slow.

What kind of video do you intend to edit with this? And why does the solution appeal to you for that purpose.

As far as the 3GBps, thats the theoretical max throughput of esata, but I dont know of a HDD or a commercially available MAC or PC that would give you that speed. With a fast HDD, you may expect a max read speed of around 90-100 MBps. Just looking around though at test results that seems optimistic at best.

If you want the flexibility of being able to hot swap hard drives, its got a use. But for performance speed its not too hot.
 
I don't have the docking station, but a friend of mine does. He has a lot of different projects and swaps external drives in and out all the time. I am pretty sure he edits mostly 1440 HDV with no problem.

I use external eSATA enclosures for back up to my very important projects and files. I only transfer files for editing from the external eSATA into my internal 'raid 0' setup for HD edits. A raid setup is the best performance for HD editing.

I have a new SATA3 motherboard and will soon give that a try for external drives. That may be the future...
 
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