Packaging and Product

As usual, I have unboxed and taken a close look at the product on video. Hit the play button below!

I would encourage you to watch the video above, but if you didn't, here are some details on the device. Starting from the front of the device, you can see that the design is the same as all previous Sharkoon toasters. You can see the Sharkoon logo on the left followed by the eject button and on the right is the LED status indication area. There are two lights - one for blue to indicate power and red to indicate hard drive activity.

Looking at the image above, we can see the back of the unit and from the left we see the on / off power button, power input and the USB 3.0 port. It is easy to tell what is USB 2.0 and what is USB 3.0 by checking the color. USB 2.0 most of the time is just plain black, but USB 3.0 is indicated by blue ports and connectors.

Speaking of the blue connectors, above you get a look at the USB 3.0 cable that is included with the Sharkoon toaster. It is nice to see that Sharkoon included a decent length cable; it is about 100cm long.

Sharkoon also sent us its USB 3.0 controller card that is sold separately. It is based on the NEC controller and plugs into a PCI Express x1 2.0 slot on any motherboard and adds two USB 3.0 ports to your system. The card will fit into any PCI Express slot, so if you don't have a spare PCI-E x1 free, don't worry.

Now let's move onto the all important benchmarks!