With a wide range of products in the PC case market Thermaltake lately is heavily targeting the external hard drive storage market. Earlier this year they released the innovative BlacX which brought a new way of working with external drives in a simply yet effective way. Right now we're going to look at a more typical external hard drive chassis though with the Thermaltake Vi-Ion but also with a few tricks up it's sleeve.

The Vi-Ion we looked at is black and glossy and thus quite reflective on both sides which does catch finger prints quite easily. Luckily though Thermaltake have included a cloth just for cleaning it so they've definitely thought ahead on the matter. There's some perforation throughout the middle of the case to allow for air flow through the drive. A small dock is also included to stabilize the Vi-Ion, somewhat similar to the Nintendo Wii docking bay.

Installing a hard drive is a breeze with the Vi-Ion, simply push down to slide off one of the side panels and align the hard drive with the E-SATA power and data ports on the inside, cover it back up and connect your plugs and you have an external hard drive ready to go. Why all external hard drives can't be this simple we don't know but Thermaltake definitely seem to have taken a page from the BlacX in designing this case.

Feature wise Thermaltake includes what's called the Active SMART cooling system which regulates a fan inside to change how fast it spins depending on the temperature inside the case. This may not be a new feature for fans on your processor but for fans on an external drive this is definitely a change of pace. Thermaltake also includes a hard drive suspension system to minimize hard drive vibration and eliminate operating noise.

The Vi-Ion supports up to a 1TB drive and uses both ESATA and USB 2.0 for connections. No firewire support is included which is somewhat of a disappointment as it is still heavily used on some camcorders and other devices.

Now let's take a look at performance and specs.