iStarUSA xAGE-N99-SAU Review

Whatever that came first, Thermaltake's BlacX is the HDD docking station that popularized this product in the industry, thanks to Thermaltake's brand itself as well as excellent marketing that brought it to the table. A few months later, we've seen a steady amount of such products saturate the market -- if which most of them now communicate with your computer with standard eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces. Not only are they compatible with standard 3.5 inch desktop hard drives, but also 2.5" units typically associated with laptops and the such. You'll never know how useful such a product is when you have a bunch of hard drives needed to be swapped on the fly. Anyways, derivatives of the products in the same category go as far as adding a card reader or even a dual bay reader. In a market economy system, it's safe to say that having more brands to choose from isn't necessarily a bad thing, since more competition will inevitably cause better and cheaper products. Today, we'll be looking at a hard drive docking station from iStarUSA -- you may remember them from our iStarUSA T5F-SS review a few weeks back. This time, however we will be taking a look at the iStarUSA xAGE-N99-SAU. Our only complaint is that... can't they come up with a more creative, or at least easy to remember name? That said, let's crack the box open and see how it goes.