Awesome Accessory - External Hard Drive Dock USB/eSATA

I finally invested in an external hard drive dock. Some are USB, some eSATA, some both. I know the Thermaltake one has best reviews, but it only supports ONE hard drive. Having dealt with StarTech hardware before, I invested in their dual hard drive external dock (bought at newegg).

This one has two eSATA connections (one for each drive), and one USB connection. It requires external power. There is also a power switch for each hard drive. They require a long travel to activate, but I guess that's a good thing considering you don't want to accidentally turn one off!

Here is a photo of the device:



This is a great idea. I frequently do hard drive swaps for myself and friends, family, coworkers. Before I would have to open my desktop case and plug in to my onboard SATA ports. Kind of a pain.

With this, you can plug in any 3.5" or 2.5" SATA hard drive. They are hot swappable too. With dual drive slots, it makes doing a disk copy a snap. I have a few spare 3.5" and a couple 2.5" hard drives that I now have instant use for different backup purposes. The device is also small enough to be portable so you can take your notebook with you and evaluate or disk copy a customer's hard drive easily on site.

So far have only used USB, which works fine, but as soon as I get a PCI eSATA card for my desktop, I'll evaluate that. It should be much quicker since each drive will have it's own eSATA cable.

Either way, I don't know how any PC enthusiast or tech can do without one.

 

Yup, I've ordered one of these puppies up thru Newegg.

 

Reminds me of an SNES


I've considered getting one but I realize that I don't HD swap that often and if I do, taking the time to dissemble my 3.5" external HD isn't that much of a hassle. Plus, my desk is also darn crammed, one less gadget means a rad more space for something else random

 

It looks very good.