Hello, this is Dong Ngo for CNET.com and today we'll check out the BlackBox from a
company called Vox.
And no it's not something from an airplane or for an airplaine. We find the name rather
interesting. As you can see, the box itself is very much white. However, there's a clear
label here that reads "BlackBox" so there you go: This is a White Blackbox. And what is
it exactly?
Despite the fancy name, this is a simple compact 2 bay NAS device. Its full name is 1TB
BlackBox Dual Bay Gigabit. And that says a lot about what it has to offer!
On the font, it's easy to see the two bays; each can hold an SATA hard drive of any size.
The Blackbox comes with two 500GB hard drives making up 1TB total of storage space.
These two bays are locked and you can't open them with bare hands, you need the keys
and they are included with the device. Here is one of them, you just need to push this end
into the little hole here and voila, the drive now is open. Actually calling this thing "a
key" is an overstatement as a paperclip would do the job just fine.
Above the bays here is a fancy power light that lights up when the device is plugged. The
color of the light changes according to the status of the device. Each bay has a little blue
light here that flashes when the drive inside is working. The BlackBox allows the hard
drives to work independently or combined in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.
The drives are not hot-swappable, meaning you need to turn the device off before you can
replace them.
On the back, there's a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB port and the power port. Unlike other
compact two bay NAS devices, the Blackbox has built-in power supply so there's no
power adaptor but just the power cord. This makes the device require less space to
operate. However the built-in power supply generates a lot of heat and to support this, the
BlackBox comes with two fan two fans. This means this can potentially be noisier than
others. The USB port can be used to connect to additional storage.
The entire case is made of aluminum making it very sturdy, rugged and pretty heavy.
The BlackBox goes for about 340 dollars with the hard drives included, which is a pretty
good deal considering other similar devices are on sale for about the same price without
the hard drives. However, the Blackbox is a very simple NAS device offering only FTP
and iTunes servers as extra features beside the inherent network storage function.
Once again my name is Dong Ngo and this has been the first look at the 1TB BlackBox
Dual Bay Gigabit from Vox.
