RocketStor 5212
Fast Thunderbolt Disk Docking Station
The RocketStor 5212 is the first Thunderbolt disk-docking station on the market. It's a dual-bay dock that can simultaneously handle 3.5″ and 2.5″ disks of up to 4 TB each. Made of white ABS plastic, the RocketStor 5212's one Thunderbolt port dictates that the unit sits at the end of the daisy chain.
I ran various tests on the device, including its ability to maintain transfer speeds suitable for video editing. A Western Digital Blue 1-TB disk docked in the RocketStor 5212 gave me a 140-MB/s write speed and a 135-MB/sec read speed. Under ideal circumstances, this disk maxes out at a 179-MB/s burst rate. You can use the RocketStor 5212 for extended periods of time, although this will heat up the disk considerably.
During this test, I found the RocketStor 5212 shows S.M.A.R.T. (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data as if the inserted disk was an internal one—no firmware gets in the way. I copied a total of 48,000 files, images, and video. The copying test took one-and-a-half hours to complete.
You can also use the RocketStor 5212 as a duplicator. An 87-GB folder took only 16 minutes to copy; in two-and-a-half hours you can duplicate almost 1 TB of data using only the RocketStor 5212.
With a 4-TB upper limit per disk and unrestricted Thunderbolt performance that allows docked disks to work at their native SATA speed, the RocketStor 5212 is a great image backup and archiving device, while it will also manage video-editing sessions for up to 1080/50p.
Company:Â HighPoint Technologies, Inc.
Price: $199
Web: www.hptmac.com
Rating:Â 4.5
Hot:Â Speed; flexibility
Not: Design; only one Thunderbolt port