14 DAY TRIAL // Thermaltake has chosen this as the time of introduction for the Max Series of personal computer accessories, composed of two products called Thermaltake Max 5G and Thermaltake Max Duo.
The former is an external hard disk drive enclosure that fits into a desktop case's 5.25-inch drive bay, the type usually reserved for optical disk units (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.).
The other is a 5.25-inch accessory as well, but it can fit two drives, one of the 3.5-inch size and another of the 2.5-inch form factor.
What they have in common is that they rely on USB 3.0, the SuperSpeed iteration of Universal Serial Bus interface.
According to the press release, the Max series came to be due to “a simple idea of creating a protective cover to magnify the ease of removing a HDD from Thermaltake chassis.”
The Thermaltake Max Duo SSD & HDD Rack with USB 3.0 has one 2.5-inch and one 3.5-inch bay, plus a 20-pin internal header that manages them both at the same time.
Hot-swap and hot-plug capabilities are fully supported, as is tool-free access and drive installation. There is even an access LED indicator that shows whether or not the HDDs are working and a front panel power switch can turn the units off when they aren't needed.
Meanwhile, the Thermaltake Max 5G 2.5-inch Hard Drive External Enclosure houses a single drive and also has plug-and play installation. It can only hold a 2.5-inch SATA I, SATA II or SATA III drives though.
USB 3.0 is said to work at up to 5.0 Gbps, but whether or not this upper limit is achieved depends solely on the storage drives themselves. SSDs are more likely to succeed in this than HDDs, although the latter have a clear capacity advantage.
Unfortunately, even though the Max 5G 2.5-inch External Hard Drive Enclosure and Max 5 Duo SATA HDD Rack already have their own product pages, their prices are unknown.
