Usage
Using the dock is pretty simple and installs in seconds. Just simply slide a 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive into one of the slots, making sure the connections line up, and power on the device (this is of course after making the necessary power and data connections). No drivers are required unless you’re using a legacy OS.
One Drive
Two Drives
There a couple of benefits from using a HDD dock over an enclosure. It’s much easier to install a HDD dock than an enclosure because installation only takes a few seconds. The nice part of having two drive bays is being able to transfer data between two drives while you’re still using a computer.
Unlike some enclosures the HDD dock can be turned on and off with the large button found on the front of the device. The blue LED around the button lights up whenever the device is on. The other blue LED below the button shows the activity of each HDD.
Testing
In our testing we used two programs: HD Tune and SiSoftware’s Sandra. We will be testing the capabilities of both USB and eSATA connections. Here are the results of the USB test:
And the eSATA results:
Testing both of the slots revealed no significant difference in transfer rates. Of course the eSATA rates exceeded the USB results with nearly double the transfer rate. The USB achieved an average of 28.3MB/sec while the eSATA results achieved an average of 60.7MB/sec; both had an access time of 12.7ms, which is the same we’ve seen in previous tests for the test drive.
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