I use it to scan old hard drives to move off data and then clear them.

This duplicator works as advertised I cloned my old and slow mechanical hard drive to a new solid state hard drive and now have speed blazing speed!

Originally I bought it to secure erase my hard drives, but what the description does not tell you is the following:1

Combine the space to form one hard drive (C) or make separate drives

Now my older computer is significantly faster because of the Solid State Drive

We clone 10-20 hard drives a day, essentially a Sysprep'ed image of Windows 7.

Also great as an external hard drive or reader.

I wanted to save myself the trouble of populating the new hard drive from scratch (install OS, drivers, applications, etc and recover all my user files from backups -- this would take me days of work

This unit worked great up until it started killing hard drives

It took about an hour to clone a 250 GB hard drive.

We don't think this is the solution since both Samsung hard drives worked perfectly on a different hard drive stand alone cloner.

If your system board does not support SATA port multiplying you will need a PCI-E SATA add-in board that supports port multiplying to see two drives, otherwise only one drive will be accessible

I cloned a spindle hard drive to an SSD giving my portable photo viewer/backup device a lot more space.

The 320GB Toshiba hard drive on my Acer Aspire 5750Z started to slow down to a snails pace, so got a 500GB WD blue and used the StarTech (non-eSATA) unit to clone over to the new drive

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

It will tell you if the drive or drives you are working with have any kind of problem.

but it works like nothing else to clone hard drives.

I was able to duplicate a Linux hard drive.

gB.We did test both newer hard drives on a separate copying/cloning device to verify that the problem was not with our newer Samsung PATA IDE 160 gB Hard Drives

I used it to duplicate a couple of very important hard drives

Male to Female 20 inch Power and Data Extension Cable -- just purchased 2 of these from Amazon and a 1 TB hard drive

Over all a great tool to copy IDE to SATA, SATE to IDE, SATA to SATA, IDE to IDE, 1 to 1 duplicate, backup, and update your hard drives

I lost two drives, which I managed to partially recover

Cloned a 1 TB hard drive with a few things on it

Stupid-easy drive duplication - just make sure the destination drive is the same size or larger than the destination drive.1) Serves as a fantastic USB dock for bare drives - transfer speeds from SSD to SSD are near-motherboard speeds.2

The hard drive duplication did not work so well.

Only thing to look out for is the drives get hot if you don't have some means of blowing cool air over them while there running

I'm not sure I'm using it to it's full potential however it cloned the new hard drive perfectly.

It works OK, I have had issue when with the copied drives with the MBR not working properly so the drive would have to do just wiped and redone (time waster)

Just duplicated Quantity 5 - 500G hard drives

It attempted to clone a 1TB Ubuntu 16.04 hard drive.

I was so worried that I would erase my source drive, but it cloned the drive perfectly

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was able to clone a failing system drive

SATDOCK2REU3 then click the downloads tabWhen you have completed a drive copy, with power off, plug back in your USB3 cable and the duplicator will operate as an external hard drive enclosier to view and move file on the drives

It's also great if you want to upgrade from the slower IDE hard drives to the faster SATA drives or if you just want to upgrade to a larger hard drive (OS and Motherboard permitting of course).

Would love it if they'd made some sort of adapter cable so that you don't have to remove hard drives from their laptop tray each time you want to duplicate one that you've pulled from a laptop bay.

I've been using Symantec Ghost for years to clone hard drives.

You should also note that while cloning, the drives got quite hot

I had read about the hard drive duplicator in Smart

Clone very slow unless you have a fast hard drive

Fantastic results duplicating hard drives.

StarTech specifies a clone speed of 7GB/min, but when cloning 5 drives at once, we're only seeing copy speeds of around 500MB/min, leading to 10-12 hour cloning times for ~500GB SanDisk SSDs rated for 500MB/sec writes.

I purchased this in addition to a new hard drive to clone my main hard drive in my desktop because I was receiving SMART warnings that the hard drive might fail soon.

Also very effective for checking hard drives for errors.

I use it to work on internal hard drives when it is not installed on a pc

I haven't found any incompatible drives so far, and the stand-alone erase feature is very handy

Purchased this to replace the hard drives that came in my children's laptops with larger ones.

I use a small fan to cool down the drives when I clone

Backups are fine (and a must) but when your hard drive crashes is such a pain to have to replace it and reinstall the operation system, all your programs, and then your backed up data

So, I can't vouch regarding whether this would work as well if the hard drives were not identical.

I erased a 500GB hard drive and it took over 24 hours, whereas when I used a software program (DoD 32x) it took about 4 hours.

Formats the hard drive quick & efficiently

works great for cloning hard drives

Since losing a hard drive completely sucks, I decided to purchase a new WD 2TB Black drive

No mess, no fuss, plug in the drives, press a button and presto!

I bought a new and faster hard drive for my primary machine and using the old drive as an emergency backup drive.

Used device one time so far to clone a 250 Gb hard drive to another bare 250 Gb hard drive.

But one problem I found is it doesn't report hard drive's SMART data

Their laptops came with 160gb hard drives which they quickly filled, so I purchased 1TB hard drives to replace them.

Had issues cloning drives with various

I then used it to clone other computers hard drives

Not all drives can do secure erase3

This dock supports the large capacity drives and Windows now longer gives me the timeout error

The unit is incompatible with solid state drives, i.e. It won't identify/find SSDs

The company states "Providing quick, yet complete hard drive cloning functionality, this universal dock can operate as a standalone HDD duplicator with no connection to a host computer, delivering an exact 1 to 1 clone of the target hard drive including partition and boot sector information, the Host Protected Area (HPA) as well as user data

My hard drive duplicating set is now complete and works very well for my purposes of making clone backups of my computer hard drives (both IDE legacy systems and SATA systems).I highly recommend the combination of this duplicator and the 2 cables because the combination now allows me to backup clone my hard drives without having to remove them from the computer.

It was also able to detectan IDE SSD, once the drive jumper set the drive as the master, and do a copy

I ended up downloading a cloning software program and used the USB direct mode and was able to get our hard drives cloned, but not with the built in direct copy of this gadget.

I have an external little fan at the side of the hard drives because they generate a lot of heat cloning, not a problem.

The two methods use the onboard motherboard SATA to clone and will tie up the computer for 4 - 6 hours cloning a 500 GB hard drive and the process seemed hit or miss

I use this in conjunction with a Seagate 4TB BarraCuda SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive (ST4000DM005) as a time machine for my MacBook backups

They do fit very tightly and you have to be careful about disconnecting from the hard drives and the duplicator

Popped it back in my machine and it fired up install just like it was the old drive with no problems.

Used this to recover data, duplicate drives for clients, and more

Using the StarTech, it copied the original system drive onto a spare solid state drive, byte for byte

The drives just appear and work perfectly.

Excellent all around & versatile unit for hard drive manipulation & use.

Product does not work - failed every attempt at replication of a hard drive.

The data destruction works as advertised (fills drives with 00), though the LED indicators take a bit of getting used to (keeping the instructions handy for a bit helps)

I have also erased some drives

I purchased this duplicator to as it clones both 512 byte and 4KB physical sector hard drives

is pull the power, and I CAN'T turn off the blue copy button, which is stupid because it would be very easy to have two drives in the unit that you don't want to copy and by accident hit the third button and end up erasing a drive you never had any intention to erase

Very useful copying drives including SSD clones.

UPDATE 3/25/2013After doing multiple clones of various hard drives, I have found this device will stop the cloning process if the source drive has any read defect

I haven't yet used it for duplication, but as far as connecting external drives it works very well.

Just got this today, pulled it out the box, plugged in a hard drive, and noticed the following:1.

We are always formatting hard drives.

Clone very slow unless you have a fast hard drive

I was able to copy a encrypted hard drive with Red Hat Linux.

I have written and read from two different hard drives

this seems to be the only brand (other than aluratek) to last usually what blows these things out is the heat produced from the hard drive.

Firm connection between duplicator SATA ports and hard drives

This duplicator also works with fully encrypted hard drives perfectly - we're using PGP Whole Disk Encryption - the duplicated drive is fully encrypted as well.

Great for erasing hard drives.

my 500gb hard drive to a 1 tb drive.

Or use it with your computer, as an external hard drive hub, that you can use to copy to or from different types of drives(SATA or IDE)

In fact, I can see both partitions that my original hard drive contained.

I can now keep a duplicate of my hard drive should it fail

Great Idea but difficulty mounting hard drives with OSX necessitated it's return.

It works OK, I have had issue when with the copied drives with the MBR not working properly so the drive would have to do just wiped and redone (time waster)

find HDD Duplicators choose USB-3-Hard-Drive-Duplicator-Docking-Station

Stupid-easy drive duplication - just make sure the destination drive is the same size or larger than the destination drive.1) Serves as a fantastic USB dock for bare drives - transfer speeds from SSD to SSD are near-motherboard speeds.2

I simply keep the master HDD in this unit, and whenever the publisher erases its hard drive, I simply pop it into the front slot of this unit and push the button to duplicate the image from the master to a backup HDD

I ended up making two drives by partitioning the one hard drive into a C and D drive

I used it to duplicate a couple of very important hard drives

I cloned a 640 GB to 1 TB SATA to SATA in 3 hours and it runs just fine, just before trying the following:One of theI just new Seagate 500 GB ST500DM002 hard drives I recently bought from Amazon

For hard drives, I used two Samsung 850 Pro SSDs, model MZ-7KE128.

Unsupported drive:

If even one bit is changed, the drive won't work for us

Follow up: We heard from StarTech.com a fourth time and their response was to contact Samsung the manufacture of the hard drives we are using.

If the drive was in good operation Acronis worked fine, for drives with lots of bad sectors ShadowProtect seems to do a better job

Also great to wipe a drive clean.

The unit works well as two USB 3.0 drives.

Give a person a sense of security in case of hard drive failure.

I have several hard drives that I use periodically but don't have space inside of my desktop, I don't use all of them at every minute so being able to swap them in and out when needed is great

wished I would have know the erase time on it though lol....but have not copied a hard drive

I can plug two disks into this and my Mac sees two hard drives that I can format or RAID using Apple Disk Utility or SoftRAID, then install them or store them wherever I like

Also great as an external hard drive or reader.

Do not trust the guide included in the box!#2 go to Startech's webpage and download the PDF guide go the startech sight find HDD Duplicators choose USB-3-Hard-Drive-Duplicator-Docking-Station

You can not plug your old hard drive into it

I used two 2TB hard drives.

This duplicator works as advertised I cloned my old and slow mechanical hard drive to a new solid state hard drive and now have speed blazing speed!

I bought this to wipe several dozen decommissioned hard drives

(My original hard drive had a system recovery partition from the original computer manufacturer).

I formatted the spare for the new hard drive.

It spins up the hard drives but does not install any of the software it supposedly is supposed to do automatically and my computer doesn't recognize the device at all.

I used it to clone a 2 TB. hard drive

Every two weeks I remove them and drop into this duplicator to clone them onto identical hard drives.

This has been the best external drive dock I've ever

Alone Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner/Copier

Works great - Hard drives get extremely hot

Make sure when copying one hard drive to another that the target hard drive is as big or bigger than the original

It doesn't seem to have a problem with good working hard drives

Just an added note: If your old hard drive is good enough to be cloned, then save it as an emergency back up that you can use if you mess up the new hard drive (which I did)

Provides backup of your hard drive to new drive.

For duplicating many types/sizes of hard drives with out using a computer

Great for replacing hard drives that might be failing

As I am responsible for the IT in a small business I am constantly replacing hard drives and until I found this product this process could take hours to days to complete

Drive was unreadable for cloning

With a hard drive failing on a Windows 7 PC, scheduled backups had not completed for over a month and I hadn't noticed

This is adequate enough to keep everything stable and keeps the hard drives cool without need for fan

My goal was to use this to erase drives, but since that feature sucks, I rarely use this

Device is not really appropriate for continuous use -- the hard drives will get quite hot after several hours.

- wish this had the eSATA interface which usually can pass through SMART queriesBottom line: if you need a small number of hard drives cloned, it works well on Windows (NTFS, FAT32)

I bought this dock mainly to clone a failing hard drive

) Superspeed USB 3.0 to Dual 2.5/3.5 in SATA Hard Drive Docking Station -

Hard drives die and get bigger and it is extremely helpful (as well as economical) to have a tool like this to do your own repairs and upgrades

After the first clone of an encrypted hard drive, the cloning feature stopped worked right

Works solidly as a external hard drive dock.

cables to be used between this device and the hard drives

Does an excellent 1 to 1 drive copy on same size drives.

I then used it to erase the data on multiple old currently unused hard drives

Great product for duplicating drives -Rapid Restorel of ANY OS as it is a sector based duplication process

I have older WD Black hard drives, WD1600 is the one that will not work on this docking station

I'm better off using the alternate product that has one disk bay, no copy functionality, and the built-in fan to cool the drive.

Also great to plug in hard drives to see what is on them, use them as external drives with no drive cases needed

I always powered the device off before removing or hooking up hard drive

We were using ghost to image hard drives, but we had built up a supply of hard drives and I thought using a drive cloner would speed things up and make it easier to ready PCs

And I just now pulled the factory hard drive running Windows 10 Pro (Toshiba 1TB) with 327 GB of used space and cloned it to a WD Black 1TB

Make sure the 'source' or hard-drive you want to clone is smaller than destination 'hard-drive.

, it notifies me that my computer will reboot to reconfigure the partition, and viola my computer now has a fully usable 2TB drive

I put a label on #1 Source & #2 Destination or Target so I could feel better about cloning my drives.

but it is unclear to me exactly what this means - certainly you can copy a drive that was a RAID master from some system without using the USB cable, but I think the USB cable allows you to connect this duplicator to your PC, and use the duplicator as a RAID controller, so you can hang one or two drives off this duplicator, and let it RAID your PC internal hard drive activity

Also great to plug in hard drives to see what is on them, use them as external drives with no drive cases needed

Works great as long as your hard drive is not already on the verge of failure or has failed, but that goes mostly without saying.

This is a review of the STARTECH.COM USB 3.0 to 2.5 / 3.5in SATA Hard Drive Docking Station and Standalone HDD / SSD Duplicator /

I copied my Western Digital 500gb hard drive to a Samsung 850 EVO 500gb SSD drive

We needed to make copies of an IDE hard drive

The tech support folks were all very nice but being "nice" does not resolve the fact that apparently this unit does not do the task in claims it can do for the larger size hard drives IDE

if you need to clone a drive, erase a drive, or just dock a drive, this works great

I received the duplicator as promised, along with a new hard drive to replace my original.

You won't have to worry about your hard drive's formatting with the StarTech duplicator because it clones drives with 512 byte sectors and 4KB sectors in a breeze at reportedly 22GB/m with the standalone function

Device is not really appropriate for continuous use -- the hard drives will get quite hot after several hours.

This model also has the feature of deleting hard drives which worked well.

I bought this to get a copy of my laptop hard drive before it crashed (was getting blue screens telling me it would be soon)

This hard drive duplicator can also be used to couple an external hard drive to your PC, but it really shines as a stand-alone duplicator without any special setup procedures

Saved many hours of time fussing with restoring from old backups and recreating updates of user files!Here are my summary pros & cons: + core duplicator function works well if not very fast as a drive copier + erase function is a nice, relatively quick function, 1 pass only + works very well to allow one to upgrade from a small old SATA drive to a newer larger capacity SATA drive + verified function up to 3TB as target drive + % complete LEDs work well to indicate progress in disk copying or erasureCons & quirks: - the copy function is not very fast

Works excellently and transfers data from one hard drive to another without the need for a computer to be attached

Very handy to have, Made a backup / clone of my hard drive

This is adequate enough to keep everything stable and keeps the hard drives cool without need for fan

To my surprise this clones hard drives very well

Small to mid sized use this is a very simple and straight forward tool for making one to one copies or replacing hard drives

The StarTech drive duplicator makes drive cloning simple and relatively fast

Just an added note: If your old hard drive is good enough to be cloned, then save it as an emergency back up that you can use if you mess up the new hard drive (which I did)

I use it for back ups and duplicating my boot disk in case of hard drive failure.

Perfect device to duplicate your hard drive

On the plus side it will duplicate any drive regardless of file system (or lack there of).As far as quality of the design goes, the power plug is not very standard, would have been nice if it used a 12v only and had an integrated dc/dc buck converter built in allowing a regular barrel connector for power.

I bought and returned the Startech for replacement and could not get either to clone a hard drive.

Works great - Hard drives get extremely hot

During cloning, the drives (3.5") became quite warm.

I always clone my working hard drive in case my working hard drive crash or get hit by a virus where I can just swamp it.

I was now in the dilemma of doing an image restore from my external backup or using the StarTech HDD Hard Drive Duplicator Dock from my job.

I de-installed the new drive and installed the original hard drive I had just cloned from, and thankfully my old computer booted right up.

I wouldn't recommend hot swapping the drives, it loses power and shuts down and then powers up again.

and I have made many Hard drive copies with this

both Windows 10 and SMART were telling me the drive was failing, and I was getting read errors occasionally) to a larger drive

Great product as cloner and hard drive reader

You have to have USB3 slot for this unit,It may be backwards compatible (I DON"T KNOW), Do your own research, or buy an older model