Hey guys it’s me again! I was recently reached out to by a representative from a company called Unitek asking if I had anything they could send me out to review – we settled on one of their USB 3.0 hard drive docking stations. It’s a pretty unique solution (admittedly I’ve not done a lot of looking, but I haven’t seen anything quite like it before) and it arrived quite quickly. Shipped via DHL which was interesting to me because everything I have ever gotten is usually from UPS or Fedex, but DHL has always seemed to be high quality.
Of course, the packaging has some classic ‘not quite perfect’ English on it, but it all makes sense fine enough. This model has an offline clone button which doesn’t require a computer to make use of it. Thankfully, the process to get the clone started is not as easy as just tapping the button like I was worried it might be, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally cloning a drive overtop of existing information…
It comes with a little dust cap to prevent… well, dust, from getting inside the enclosure while you are not using it. I’m assuming you’re probably meant to throw it out after you actually open it up for the first time, but I elected to just swap it out and stick it on the underside of the enclosure in case I wanted to use it in the future.
Much to my surprise – and happiness – I learned the bits covering the 3,5inch drive port are actually ‘flaps’ and not entire sections that came out (and therefore would very quickly be lost.) Props to whoever decided on that, I approve.
As a minor aside, I had a 1TB Seagate external hard drive that decided to die on me not too long ago. I’m not sure what went wrong but I figured it might be the SATA-to-USB-A converter's PCB, and after I pulled it out of the enclosure and removed the 3,5 inch hard drive, noticed it was a red PCB which generally indicates alpha/pre-release builds. Neat. My suspicions of it being the issue were confirmed when I placed the ‘dead’ hard drive into the enclosure (alongside a 500GB SSD and later, a 500GB MacBook HDD) and to my surprise, it spun up and read just fine. Sweet.
Thing is fast. It supports USB 3.0 which means it will transfer up to 405 megabytes per second, and I’m definitely pleased with that. I figured I would try out the ‘offline clone’ feature because it could potentially be funny considering how I had my other drives partitioned out. Reading the manual, I unplugged it from my computer and set it into offline clone.
The manual says we will see 4 lights all lit up when it is done. It took about 30 minutes, if I recall correctly. Four lights! Yay! Let’s see how it worked out…
Wait, what? It even successfully navigated the fact that it was partitioned to 500GB and successfully partitioned the clone drive to that size too?
Colour me impressed. I can see this being absurdly useful for people who deal with lots of data, instead of having to manually copy it back and fourth.
So in summary: Looks pretty good, works very well, and functions exactly as described. Quite impressive!
For anyone who wants the link, you can get it here for $39 US:
https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Ext...srs=8332977011&ie=UTF8&qid=1468258405&sr=8-27
If you guys have any questions/comments let me know!
Of course, the packaging has some classic ‘not quite perfect’ English on it, but it all makes sense fine enough. This model has an offline clone button which doesn’t require a computer to make use of it. Thankfully, the process to get the clone started is not as easy as just tapping the button like I was worried it might be, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally cloning a drive overtop of existing information…
It comes with a little dust cap to prevent… well, dust, from getting inside the enclosure while you are not using it. I’m assuming you’re probably meant to throw it out after you actually open it up for the first time, but I elected to just swap it out and stick it on the underside of the enclosure in case I wanted to use it in the future.
Much to my surprise – and happiness – I learned the bits covering the 3,5inch drive port are actually ‘flaps’ and not entire sections that came out (and therefore would very quickly be lost.) Props to whoever decided on that, I approve.
As a minor aside, I had a 1TB Seagate external hard drive that decided to die on me not too long ago. I’m not sure what went wrong but I figured it might be the SATA-to-USB-A converter's PCB, and after I pulled it out of the enclosure and removed the 3,5 inch hard drive, noticed it was a red PCB which generally indicates alpha/pre-release builds. Neat. My suspicions of it being the issue were confirmed when I placed the ‘dead’ hard drive into the enclosure (alongside a 500GB SSD and later, a 500GB MacBook HDD) and to my surprise, it spun up and read just fine. Sweet.
Thing is fast. It supports USB 3.0 which means it will transfer up to 405 megabytes per second, and I’m definitely pleased with that. I figured I would try out the ‘offline clone’ feature because it could potentially be funny considering how I had my other drives partitioned out. Reading the manual, I unplugged it from my computer and set it into offline clone.
The manual says we will see 4 lights all lit up when it is done. It took about 30 minutes, if I recall correctly. Four lights! Yay! Let’s see how it worked out…
Wait, what? It even successfully navigated the fact that it was partitioned to 500GB and successfully partitioned the clone drive to that size too?
Colour me impressed. I can see this being absurdly useful for people who deal with lots of data, instead of having to manually copy it back and fourth.
So in summary: Looks pretty good, works very well, and functions exactly as described. Quite impressive!
For anyone who wants the link, you can get it here for $39 US:
https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Ext...srs=8332977011&ie=UTF8&qid=1468258405&sr=8-27
If you guys have any questions/comments let me know!
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.