MAIWO 4 Bay Hard Drive Docking Station Cloner for 2.5 3.5 Inch SATA HDD SSD, USB 3.0/eSATA 5Gbps Speed with UASP, 96TB Capacity, External HDD Duplicator Reader

I don't recall drive docks being this responsive. I didn't know what to write because this thing just works as it should but I think I've had some goofy ones recently and this one doesn't give me a hassle. If you need to just get something that's not broken, and not want to spend effort on searching for something that should just be a simple purchase, well this is that, your simple purchase, it just works, doesn't get in the way. I got this one primarily because it didn't give me the impression that it would clone (overwriting) one of my other drives, if I sneezed near it. I almost forgot to mention , this isn't the first one of its brand that I purchased. After testing it for awhile I got another one, this is the other one.

Simple et fonctionnel

I bought this 4-bay SATA USB dock almost two years ago, and for a long time it behaved like a good little device. Plug it in, drop in drives, everything worked. Life was good. Then one day—poof—it stopped working. No warning. No drama. Just dead. I contacted support, hoping for help. Instead, I got a polite shrug and a 15% discount offer on a replacement. “Do I want to buy another one that might quit after two years?” Yeah… no thanks. Turns out the warranty is only one year, so repairing it was officially not their problem. That stung, especially since I have SATA-to-USB adapters that have been working happily for 5–10 years. Suddenly this “deal” didn’t feel like much of a deal at all. At this point, I had nothing to lose. So I became a hero. I peeled off the rubber feet, removed the screws (four for the case, five more for the motherboard), and opened it up like a treasure chest. Inside, I went hunting for the dreaded enemy… SMOOOOOO. Armed with my finest tool—the mighty TOOTHPICK (strong enough to poke, gentle enough not to destroy)—I carefully inspected and cleaned the board. On the bottom side, near a SATA power solder joint, I found suspicious smoo that looked like it might be causing a short. I cleaned between the solder contacts, reassembled the unit, and took a deep breath. I plugged it in. BOOTED NORMALLY. No error. No drama. I dropped in a few drives for testing, and—YES—it worked! The dock lives again! Honestly, thank goodness it was out of warranty, or I’d still be waiting weeks for shipping instead of fixing it myself in an afternoon. I’ve put it back into service, now running four 3.5" SATA drives at a normal load. I’m happy again… cautiously happy. Will it last forever? Time will tell. But for now, the adventure has a happy ending.

An old desktop I had with several hard drives in it that served as a file server gave out. I didn't want to have another dedicated endpoint to simply host hard drives over my home network so I decided to get this dock. I have no intention of using the cloning functionality so I cannot speak to the product in that regard. However, for providing access to my files on my drives, this devices works fine. I have 2 3.5 and 2 2.5 drives inserted into the dock and the dock is connected via USB 3.0 to my Dell monitor which itself is connected to my Mac Mini. At first I wanted a USB-C connection (or was thinking of getting an adapter), but the USB 3.0 connector worked fine for me since my monitor (which serves as a hub) had a USB 3.0 port anyways. Setup was fine, transfer speeds are on par with the standards used, and the drives, either 3.5 or 2.5 (and even then, the fatter and slimmer 2.5s), sit comfortably and securely. You can insert and remove drives with the dock still plugged in. One star is knocked off for the less than ideal build materials (just a hair above too plasticy) and the drive indicator lights being rather generic and bleed into one another. Overall a decent and quick solution for my drives, I can access my files locally with ease, or across my network through my Mac Mini.

This product is mere garbage. For starters, the performance is not as advertised; at best, it performs at 20%~40% of its advertised speed ratings. Not the USB port, not the USB cable, and not the operating system, as I've tried many different ones on different computers and on 2 different operating systems. The culprit is the hardware on this crappy device! Additionally, after a few minutes of heavy writing to the connected drives, it will lose connection, likely due to bad hardware it was built with, which will result in errors such as the ones on the attached image. The UASP driver it has is beyond crap too. While computers will recognize the drives on this device as standard block devices and seem to operate correctly, they most certainly will not. Using this for serious things will more than likely end up corrupting your data and if not, it will for sure give you a bad time. Lesson learned: just spend a few extra bucks for certainty over being cheap and getting really crappy hardware such as this device. This is being returned as of this posting.