SABRENT USB 3.0 Dual Bay Hard Drive Docking Station & Cloner (EC-HD2B)

I picked up this docking station after helping my father set up his new all-in-one PC and I found a bunch of older computers and hard drives laying around his house. I brought all of the drives home with me so that I can go through all of them and make sure I save all of the pictures he’s taken over the years! This docking station was perfect since it can handle both 3.5” and 2.5” drives. It was pretty much plug and play when I first connected it to my computer. I have no issues with the processing speed, knowing some of the older drives aren’t going to be as powerful as newer SSD drives. It’s been very reliable and I haven’t had any issues accessing all of the drives I’ve attached so far. This became really handy when my Father-inLaw’s PC recently died (and he didn’t have a backup of his files). I pulled his Hard Drive out of his old tower and plugged it into the docking station, then downloaded all of his files on a 32gb thumb drive (older generation and not a lot of files!!) and took it back down to his house on our next visit. He was really happy to get all of his files back and I got to keep his 2 TB drive as a spare so I can use as my external backup drive to do monthly backups (I’m also using the Apple Devices app to download back up files from all of our devices to this drive since it has plenty of disk space). For my needs this has been the perfect solution for going through older drives to save information we didn’t want to loose - all of the pictures I’ve saved off of my dad’s old drives was well work the price of the docking station since there were hundreds of pictures from both sets of my grandparents that my father had scanned on these drives. I’m now exporting all of these pictures to thumb drives so that my sisters and cousins are getting copies of them. Some pictures my cousins have never seen and they whole family is so happy they have been saved.

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 is an absolutely nifty piece of equipment that saved my files, and my sanity, when my desktop computer suddenly crashed with no surviving files accessible! I was able to remove the hard drive from my desktop, stick it into the docking station, and recover all of the data locked away in the bricked computer. You can transfer data from one drive to another disk drive, or right onto a new computer, which is what I did. I wasn't able, so far, to re-establish communication with some programs remaining in limbo, but I'm working on that aspect. This sata portable drive was a reasonable price and a sanity saver. Plus . . .now I have even more space to keep photos I probably will never need to look at again. Thank you, Sabrent!

Update: 10-25-2023 I formatted my one of the drives in my new Sabrent Docking system and the speed more than doubled with the exact same file I used yesterday. Yesterday I was getting max 50MB/s on a 1.6TB File Today I am getting 164MB/s on the same 1.6TB File Transfer both NTSF. So, great improvement. Excellent Indeed. 10-24-2023 I got this because I have 4 OLD HDD's THAT I still want to use to back things up to. The reasons I picked this were 1. Low Cost 2. Has a Fan so no overheating, 3. Can fit both HDD 3.5 Inch and SDD 2.5 inch Hard Drives 4. It also has a cloning option built in. It was very simple to install. Literally just plug and play. My New PC recognized the Drives Straight Away. They simply act as a large volume flash drive for those wondering. I have a 2 TB, 8 TB, 4 TB and 6 TB My New computer uses the latest technology and was rather spendy so I didn't want to purchase any more hard drives just to fit inside the computer. So, for $88 plus tax it was a good deal. I am copying all of my documents, photos and personal videos about 1.6TB over from one of the HDD to another HDD in the Sabrent Dock and I am getting about 50 MB/s. Rather slow but I didn't format the old drive prior to the copy and I regret that now. I think I would have gotten better speeds had I reformatted prior to the copy. Overall I am very pleased with the Dock and Highly recommend it for anyone so long and you don't have a dog or say children that may accidentally knock it over. The drives themselves won't take much of a jostle but the dock although plastic works very well and as intended. CHEERS!

This thing is such a great addition to my tower PC ,but also works on my laptop. I am able to utilize some harddrives I have had for years to drop backups of files and transport between devices. I know we all love the cloud, But having the files directly works even if your not connected to the Internet for any reason. Or if you just want to keep your business or personal information out of the reach of hackers or a heaven forbid (pun intended) breach of your data in the the cloud drive you love so much Dont think it doesn't or won't happen to your favorite cloud Drives!! This is an inexpensive way to have your own mega data source at home. Find some good quality brand old fashioned drives and match them up with one of these. If they have a unit with a higher data transfer rate than USB 3.0 get it if you think you really need it, but this unit will process faster than most of the the the cloud paired with your wifi or even Ethernet connection in many cases. Depending on the head drive capabilities of course.

I am not a techy what so ever so I felt a little trepidation ordering this device. I needed something external to back up and store all of my digital photoshop & illustrator files, photographs and a some docs. Some research took me to this docking station. One of my criteria was that I didn't want to crack open my desktop, but needed a back up. This is basically a plug and play ( to my relief) to my desktop PC. Made sure it was formatted for a PC and began to transfer my files. Easy Peasy.

Read the instructions thoroughly before use, so you don't copy in the wrong direction. Sabrent appears to actually care about the quality of their peripherals. Good docking station for backups as well as disk-to-disk copying.

My IT recommended this product, easy to use no problem to attached to my PC , it has being week no problem so far.

منتج ممتاز لنسخ بيانات الهارديس الى الكمبيوتر

Instant plug and play. Zero issues and hdd detected immediately by OS.

buena calidad

It does what it's says in the description and it does well. Solid piece of hardware, so far very reliable!

I used other docking station , but this one the best and support HDD and as well SSD with large capacity upto 10 TB.