Vox BlackBox

>> Hello this is Dong Ngo from CNET.com and today we check out the Blackbox from a company called Vox. And no this is not something from an airplane or for an airplane. We find the name rather interesting. As you can see the Vox 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 this exactly? This by the fancy name this is a simple compact two-bay NAS device. Its full name is one Terabyte Blackbox dual bay gigabit and that says a lot about what it has to offer. On the front it's easy to see the two bays. Each can hold an SATA hard drive of any size. The Blackbox comes with two 500 gigabyte hard drives making up 1 terabyte of total storage space. These two weigh a lot and you cannot open them with bare hands. You need the key and they are included with the device. Here's one of them. You just need to push this end into the little hole here and voila--the drives now open. Actually calling this thing a key is an overstatement as a paperclip would do the job just fine. Above the base here is a fancy power light that lights up when the device is plugged in. The color of the light changes according to the status of the device. Each bay has a little blue light also here that flashes when the drive inside is working. The Blackbox allows the hard drive to work independently or combine in either red zero or red one configuration. The drives are not hot stoppable meaning you need to turn the device off completely before you can replace the hard drives inside. On the back there's a gigabit Ethernet port, a USB port and a power port. Unlike other compact two-bay NAS devices the Blackbox has a built in power supply so there's no power adaptor but just the power cord. It 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 fans. That means it can be potentially 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 on the market 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 iTune servers as extra features beside the inherent network storage function. Once again, my name is Dong Ngo and this has been a First Look at the 1 Terabyte Blackbox dual bay gigabit from Vox.