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Soar to New Heights With the Blackbird VX-2SSD USB 3.1 Gen 2 Dual SSD Media Dock

A lot of growing popularity of Thunderbolt 3 enabled USB Type-C ports on Windows PC's and MacBook Pro's, there have been a lack of a lot of Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 peripherals that could take advantage of the speed.  Thunderbolt 3 enabled USB Type-C ports can be connected to both Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gb/s) and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) storage devices.  While multi-drive Thunderbolt 3 based storage devices are generally still at price points geared for professionals, USB 3.1 Gen 2 storage devices like the Blackbird VX-2SSD promise to offer improved read/write performance to consumers that deal with large amounts of video, images, or audio media.

To get the best read/write performance, the choice of removable storage media is also important.  As USB and Thunderbolt speeds continue to become faster, the bottleneck tends to be now in the storage media itself.  SSD drives have faster performance that traditional rotating hard disk drives, and the Blackbird VX-2SSD supports two SATA Gen 3 (6 Gb/s) based 2.5" SSD drives.  The Blackbird VX-2SSD can access these drives through UASP, a more efficient way to read and write to drives over USB.

In the back of the Blackbird VX-2SSD, there are selectors you can use to set the 2 SSD drives into JBOD, RAID0, and RAID1 modes.  JBOD allows to access the 2 drives separately in the operating system, while RAID0 and RAID1 combines the 2 drives into a single combined drive.  RAID1 offers additional redundancy between the two drives so if 1 drive fails, you can still recover your data although this comes at the cost of reduced storage capacity.

You should be able to use the Blackbird VX-2SSD on Thunderbolt 3 computers like the Apple 15" MacBook Pro (Late 2016) and HP Spectre Laptop (13.3").  If you have a desktop PC with an available x4, x8, or x16 PCI Express slot, you can add the Blackbird MX-1 USB 3.1 Gen 2 PCIe Host Card to connect the Blackbird VX-2SSD.

Note the Blackbird VX-2SSD uses a USB Type-C port but doesn't support USB Power Delivery.  All power to the Blackbird VX-2SSD comes from the external AC adapter.