Datel Space Dock, External Hard Drive for PS3, Xbox 360

Posted 02/16/2010 at 1:49pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Gaming consoles are more and more positioned as entertainment centers. All well and good, as they’ve got the power necessary to live up to the task. One thing they don’t have, however, is hard drive space. And adding an external drive, for some reason is more of a chore than it deserves to be. Datel says it’s got a solution: the Space Dock, which provides a simple plug-and-play method for using an external hard drive with a PS3 or Xbox 360.

The Datel Space Dock is a 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA HDD docking station. It will handle SATA hard drives up to 1TB in size, and transfer data at up to 480Mbs. To use it with either a PS2 or Xbox 360 just plug it in. The Space Dock also connects to your PC and, using the “unique Memory Manager Software”, you can drag and drop movies, music, and pictures onto the external drive. What’s more, the Space Dock can be used to manage back-ups of your console’s internal hard drive.

Wonderful, except Datel’s product description is a bit sparse. For example, the folks at Gizmodo aptly note there’s no instructions on set-up other than plug it in. Gizmodo assumes that the drive is automatically formatted, with all necessary files for compatibility installed. But we all know what happens when we assume, don’t we? Furthermore, Gizmodo reckons the back-up feature only works with the PS3.

While the Space Dock is a good idea, it may be an even better idea to wait for a bit more information about the Space Dock to trickle out before plunking down $40 for one.

Image Credit: maxconsole.com