Thermaltake Max 5 Duet 2.5-inch Storage Rack Review

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As many of you know, Thermaltake has one of the widest product roadmaps in the industry. From chassis and cooling, to power supplies and storage solutions, they manage and refresh as the industry grows.

When building or upgrading your computer, you may find yourself wanting to add a bay device to manage your storage. With most of today's enthusiasts gravitating towards SSDs, 2.5" solutions have seen rapid growth in the industry. Because of this, Thermaltake has introduced the Max 5 line-up of hot swap racks.

Today, we have the Max 5 Duet in-house for review; it features a 3.5" form factor, feeding dual front accessible 2.5" hot swap bays. MSRP of the Thermaltake Max 5 duet sits at $29.99, with a one-year warranty.

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Within the packaging, you will find mounting screws, SATA cables, and reading materials to get you set up quickly.

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The Max 5 Duet features an aluminium enclosure, with the front locking doors made from plastic. The red tabs at the end of each door slide to unlock and open.

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The side of the enclosure houses the mounting holes for installation.

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Moving to the back of the unit, you will find two SATA connections for the drives, and one SATA power connector supplies both drives. In the packaging, there is an adapter for Molex installation.

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Here, we have installed two SATA SSDs in the Max 5. To remove the drives, you simply pull out on the doors, and the eject mechanism engages.

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Above, we have results from testing our SSD using a direct connection to the SATA III ports of our Z77 motherboard. The drive achieves 512 MB/s read, with 461 MB/s write.

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We found no performance loss upon putting our drives in the Max 5. Here, we have 510 MB/s read, and 460 MB/s write.

As with many storage solutions, the Thermaltake Max 5 Duet offers a golden solution to cleaning up existing wiring inside PC chassis. The build quality of the duet was quite good, with my only complaint being the doors feeling a bit flimsy at the hinge.

Performance of the Duet was admirable in that we lost no performance by installing our drives inside, and rightly so as these are simple pass through devices that offer the benefit of space savings, and hot swap ability.

In situations where you have a large number of drives that all need and use separate power connections, devices like the Max 5 are invaluable, and provide a way to offset the amount of space and power connections drives use. With the Max 5 Duet, you could reasonably connect eight drives to a single SATA lead from your power supply, where previously only four would fit.

The Thermaltake Max 5 Duet carries a MSRP of $29.99, with high market availability. Of course, market pricing and availability may differ at certain times, so we invite you to check current pricing below. The Max 5 Duet carries a one-year warranty.

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