Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator, External Dual Bay HDD/SSD Cloner/Copier, USB to SATA III Docking Station

Over the years, I have seen many product names come and go. So far, everything I have run across from this company StarTech has really been a good quality item for the price. You can find many other cloners and I am sure for a cheaper price, but the experience I have had with ST, i bought this one. - Good quality -- Nice and heavy for what looks to be plastic. - No issues, worked like a charm - Tested cloning a 250gb drive to a 500gb drive that was a standard boot mbr. Threw the clone in the machine and it booted up without issues. - Win7 self loaded a driver when hooked to the pc and the device then acts like a dock to access the drives via usb 3.0 - Easy to clone. Plug the source in the source slot HDD2 (yes, source is slot 2 in the one i received and i have no idea why they would do that. Logic would have you thinking to clone 1 to 2, not 2 to 1) and the destination disk into slot 1. Make sure the pc/copy button is red for copy and press the button. Wait some time and bam, it is done. Take note that this takes some time. This is not done by wiggling your nose and snapping your fingers. Your fingers will be broken by the time it is done. With 2 drives at 7200 spin SATA 3gbps, the 250gb drive was done in just under 40 minutes by my count. Throw a nice 2gb combo at the same speeds and you might want to just go eat dinner and watch a movie. Only one small thing that is becoming less of a big deal every day; IDE drives. No access to clone older IDE drives as this is for SATA only. At work, I have a lot of older pcs with IDE only. We are using every instance of trouble to simply upgrade pcs which all have SATA anyway but if i needed a quick access to a disk, it would be nice to have it here. There is an option priced on Amazon here at $18 or so that provides a dongle to fit right in this device, giving access to IDE. You need this option, a pair of these might be worth it or then find another option with this built in. Part of the reason i bought this one is that we use the StarTech 2 bay dock to access disks on the desk now as it is and enjoy the quality there as well. I bought this one for the office and may consider one for home with the option of cloning out a large windows drive that is simply ready. Good product and worth the money in my opinion. Update: 12/14/2015 - This device works great, but I did find one snag that most people will not run into, but I sure did; HPA partitions. What you do not see listed is that this will not copy a HPA partition. These partitions are used for older pcs that needed instructions on how to handle larger discs in regards to ATA and were also used for security purposes. If you are trying to clone a disk with one of these and it is the only hard drive left alive with a dead vendor, you are screwed. Now for the good news; StarTech rocks. I only took a survey and man, they were on top of things fast. Not only did they contact me to make sure my needs were fulfilled and why they were/were not, they made the whole situation right by making sure I got the right device that could do so. I offered to send this one back to compensate them back and they said "keep it, you might still use it". Class company that is certainly focusing on customer service and that says a lot of their character and how they do business.

This Startech HD duplicator (SDOCK2U33RE) worked well. (BTW,I have found all the Startech products I've used over the years are good quality.) I used it to clone a 4GB drive, a process that took about 7 hours. The cloned drive was perfect. And the process was easy once I understood how to do it. My one criticism is that I think the instructions could be made more clear and I do not understand why Startech doesn't have short video on their website that explains the process. It would have made it so much easier to get started and to understand how to use this device. Everything is very simple -- AFTER the first time you use it. Here are two things that I did not fully understand: 1. You cannot clone a drive unless the drive is REMOVED FROM THE COMPUTER. A computer is not involved in the cloning process. You just insert your old HD into slot 2 and your new drive into slot, push a button to get into the right mode (red light on) and then push "start." (Just to be clear: "Cloning" is a process to create an identical copy of your old HD. My computer had a drive that was getting flaky so I removed it, cloned it, and installed the new HD back into the computer and got back into Windows without any problems or blips.) 2. The unit can be connected to a computer to copy files -- but not to clone a drive. So, you can use it to backup files from your computer onto another HD -- which is a great feature. You should also note that while cloning, the drives got quite hot. I used a small desk fan to keep them cool. Not required but a good idea.

Used it to clone a 14tb hdd. It took about 20 hours to complete but I ended up with an identical drive with no data loss. Just make sure the source and target drives are in the appropriate slots or you’ll have a very bad day. I did a practice cloning of 2 much smaller drives (before cloning the 14tb) to make sure I was doing it correctly. HDDs got very warm during the cloning but caused no issues afterwards.

I does connect and work as described for mounting and access hard drives. Unfortunately, there is a single USB bus and if you eject one HDD the other is disconnected even in use. On Mac this results in volume improperly ejected messages. The only solution is to complete work on both HDDs, eject both, turn off the unit, swap the HDD(s) and turn the unit back on. This does not fit my work flow requirements and I will be returning it. I did not test the stand-alone duplicate feature.

Let me start off by saying, most of the people I have talked to that have a External Drive hooked up to their Direct TV DVR are all the same, the self powered and enclosed Phantom Drives. These are available from 1 TB all the way up to 6 TB, some with a cache and some with not. The first thing to point out is that these drives are the old standard 5400 rpm magnetic drives. They have their own power supply and are fully enclosed. Over the years I have gone through several of them, averaging maybe two years per drive. I am told this is about the expected lifetime of these drives as they are constantly running. Secondly, I also noticed that say I was recording the program I was watching, but at the same time I would be recording two other movies on different channels. The drive would almost lock-up because it could not physically keep up with the amount of data that was being written and read. I own (2) 3 TB Phantom Drives and I also noticed the closer they got to being full there would be a direct correlation to how fast the DVR could seek data. It seemed to me the more they got full it would drop the seek times down to a point where you could notice. So, I did some looking around for an alternative, but I had yet to run into anyone that was not using the same Phantom Drives as I was. After looking at several different drive docks I decided on the StarTech Dual Bay Duplicator Dock. Like the Phantom Drives I also hooked the StarTech dock up to my DVR via the eSATA port on the back. And just like the Phantom Drives, when you first turn on the power button while simultaneously pushing the DVR reset button the Direct TV DVR would automatically format the new drive that I had in the StarTech dock. Because of the issues I had experienced when trying to do multiple tasks with the Phantom Drives, I decided on a WD 7200 rpm Black Series HDD for the dock. Yes, the immediate "out of pocket" costs are more than that of an equal size Phantom Drive, but I believe that because I am using a faster and higher quality drive than what they put in the Phantom Drives. In the long run the extra $50 in difference would pay off in the long run by better performance and a longer drive life. Finally, I have seen people post questions in the past about the possibility of using this dock with your choice of HDD as an alternative. But up until now I have not seen anyone post a different solution. And I know that there are tens of thousands of people who use an External drive to expand the storage capability of their Direct TV DVR. Well, now you have an alternative to the Phantom Drives. The WD 7200 rpm Black series that I purchased only cost $92 and also has a 64 MB cache, which the current Phantom Drives that I have do not. A 2 TB with a 64 MB cache Phantom Drive currently sells on Amazon for only $105. But I really do think in the long run that I will be glad I spent the extra money to go the route that I did. Also there is one thing I have not yet done and that is to hook up one of the Phantom Drives to the StarTech dock and use the "duplicating" feature to copy all of the contents from that drive onto a regular 7200 rpm loose drive. As we all know when the Phantom Drives do fail, all of the time you spent building up your library of movies is lost! Now all of you Direct TV customers have a choice! Happy recording!! David

OMG! This is it! FANTASTIC! I am so happy with this time saver! So simple, so fast! I hope they will make and sell an adapter that you can use to plug a usb flash/thumb drive into your computer to replace the hard drive.

Bought in July and used it to set up lab. Worked fine. Got it out over Christmas break to redo some machines and there is no power at all. Very disappointing. Hope the is something the manufacturer is willing to do about this.

Good product