Brando E-Blue Gladiator USB Hard Disk Station [Hot-Swap Your HDDs, Brushed Steel Design, ECO Manager Auto-Hibernation Mode, Turbo USB]

There are certainly a ton of options out there when it comes to how you manage your media storage needs. From ultra-capacity portable drives to USB flash to internal terabyte HDDs with more storage capacity than you’ll ever need in this lifetime. You can pick your poison and your size limits with abandon. For those of us that need all of the capacity we can get along with super fast read/write speeds it seems like our only option has been the internal hard drive. And what are we to do if we want to manage multiple HDDs outside of the confines of a case or server? Enter the new Brando E-Blue Gladiator Hard Disk Station.

The E-Blue Gladiator certainly sounds impressive enough. After all, you wouldn’t go naming something the Gladiator unless you thought it had some punch, would you? I didn’t think so. With its brushed steel exterior it certainly looks the part, but what is this thing, anyway? The E-Blue Gladiator is basically a means to swap out multiple HDDs without the potential data loss and difficulty often found with other options. You connect it to your PC or Mac’s USB port, run the auto-install, and insert the HDD into the docking station. Sounds simple enough.

According to the folks at Brando, the E-Blue Gladiator is made up to 40% faster than traditional USB transfer speeds because of its TURBO USB technology. Sounds like a bunch of marketing bunk to me, but you can judge for yourself. To address one of the main issues with hot-swapping hard drives, the E-Blue Gladiator features something called Disk Guard that is supposed to offer data protection by locking the gate while reading and writing to the HDD. Not only can this prevent you from losing valuable info during a swap, but it also prevents damage caused by humans inadvertently ejecting a drive while it’s in use. And as well all know, there’s nothing worse than premature ejection.

The Brando E-Blue Gladiator has some pretty cool features for a fairly basic HDD dock. It also has an ECO Manager setting that automatically hibernates the unit after a pre-determined level of inactivity. You can get your own E-Blue Gladiator at usb.brando.com for a mere $65.