SABRENT USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [20+TB Support] (EC-HD2B)

I regularly have a need to temporarily connect SATA HDDs or SSDs to my computer, either to pull off some data, to wipe them clean or to run a "burn-in" test on a new HDD. In the past I used a powered SATA to USB adapter and put the bare drive onto my table (or rather onto a mat on my table to minimize vibrations).This unit is the more sophisticated version of such an adapter and makes my desk look less like a lab and more like an office. The unit provides two SATA connectors to connect two drives in parallel and even the option to perform an offline copy from one drive to another (which I did not test). It comes with a manual printed in color on high-quality paper, however the only important info I took from there is that the drive(s) should be inserted BEFORE turning on the unit. That means that the unit apparently does not have hot-plugging/hot-swapping ability (or at least it isn't officially supported).The unit has a power switch and a clear plastic cover to protect the device from dust, while not in use. Unfortunately though that plastic cover has no cut-outs for the connected power and usb cable, so it looks a little slapdash on my desk. The unit also has some padded feet, however these are very thin and do no prevent vibrations from HDDs to transmit to your desk. As a consequence I will be buying some thicker adhesive rubber feet to mitigate this.After using the unit for a few days I can say that so far it has been very reliable. I used it to do read and write tests on two HDDs (4TB and 14TB) and it has performed well. I have connected the unit to a USB 3.1 gen 1 (5Gb/s) port on my computer, which is the maximum connection speed that this unit can operate in (so no point plugging it into a 10Gb/s port). However for HDDs the performance will be dictated by speed that the HDD can provide anyway. During a linear read and write test, the speed was as high as 260 MB/s for some parts of my 14TB HDD (a WD Red Pro), but - as expected - lower in other parts of the disk). For an old 4TB disk the read and write speed was 50MB/S, so this unit can definitely keep up with current HDDs.However in principle the 5Gb/s transfer speed on the USB 3.0 interface of the unit is 18% lower than what SATA III allows for (6Gb/s), though these are theoretical speeds. To test the limits of the transfer rate, I also tested this with a 2TB Crucial MX500 2.5" SSD, the highest transfer speed on a sequential read test was about 405 MB/s. CrystalDiskMark 8 showed max. sequential read speeds of 460 MB/s for reading 5 1GiB Blocks. So the interface is plenty fast with one drive installed, at least for my needs. However when running two WD Red Pro 20TB HDDs in parallel and running a sequential write on both at the same time, the data transfer speed dropped to 160 MB/s at the beginning of the disk, then slowly increased to ca. 190 MB/s about two thirds through and then dropped toward 125 MB/s at the end of the disk. So there is definitely some overhead, when using two drives at the same time.All in all I am very pleased with this unit so far. I would deduct half a star for the clunky cover and the thin feet, but at 4.5 stars a round-up to 5 stars seems more fair than a round-down to 4 stars. I have some more HDD burn-in testing to do in the coming days, and I will update this review, if my view on this unit materially changes.

This device is great for using to hot-swap your storage drives or to simply "clone" your drives from one to another.My PC notified me that one of my older SSDs was impending failure. I purchased this device and followed the simple instructions for an "offline" clone. After a few hours it had completed copying over. After testing out the new drive, I had confirmed that all the data was pulled over.With that being done, I allowed my wife to use this. She's a professional photographer. The device comes with a 5Gbit/s USB-B 3.0 port. You can plug-and-play your bare SSD or HDD's. For those who can't afford a NAS (network attached storage system), this is a great alternative. Have a shelf or area to store your physical drives and plug them in and out when needed. It'll be a little more manual in remembering which drive stores what, but it'll get the job done.The only thing I couldn't test: The product title says "20+TB Support", but the description states "Supports hard drives up to 10TB". So, just be weary of that discrepancy.

I had a 15-year old WD Sharespace RAID 5 server composed of (4) 1TB drives which failed to rebuild itself after a power outage despite giving it 672 straight hours of rebuild time! To save the drives, I finally shut it down and purchased this Sabrent docking bay (I had tried another brand but it didn't work reliably). I put the 4 3.5 SATA drives in no particular order in the dock and used ReClaime to determine the RAID parameters and proper disk sequence then used DMDE to fully recover the data on those drives. I could NOT have saved my data if I didn't have a reliable method to host these 4 SATA drives simultaneously. After recovering my data, I reformatted these 4 WD drives as NTFS and am using them for temporary storage and file downloads so I'm still getting good use out of this Sabrent dock. Performance is excellent, I HIGHLY recommend this product!