SABRENT USB 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Lay-Flat Docking Station for 2.5 ...

This SATA HDD enclosure is perfect. I pulled it out of the box, pressed the single button to open the outer case, slipped in my 3.5" HDD, closed up the case, plugged in the USB cable, booted up the computer, and VOILA! The drive was instantly recognized and worked like a charm. I tried it with some smaller SATA drives and it also worked flawlessly. Because I was merely transferring data from old drives, I didn't bother screwing the drives into the enclosure. However, if you wish to do so (and I highly recommend that you do if you will be transporting this), there are screws and a screwdriver provided in the box. Sabrent couldn't have made this enclosure any easier! It's the best HDD enclosure I have owned (and I have had a number of different variations over the years). No more dodgy HDD toasters for me.

I bought the Sabrent ED-DFLT enclosure so that I could format various hard drives on my iMac. It's a rather long story, which I'll shorten to this: I confirmed that the Sabrent enclosure worked when I received it by using an old 2TB drive. I then tossed the box and waited for my 6TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive to arrive from Amazon a couple of weeks later. When plopped into the Sabrent, the new drive showed up on my Mac's desktop. I then set about creating a large encrypted disk image on the drive. It chugged away for 4 full days, seemingly working for the first 3. But after day 4, the formatting was clearly hung, and it had taken my Mac down with it. Upon rebooting, the drive no longer showed up at all. Disk Utility could not even see it. After a lot of detective work, too long to describe here, I confirmed that the 6TB drive was still working fine, but the Sabrent logic board had died, obviously a case of infant mortality. The good news: it can handle large capacity hard drives. The bad news: not for very long... And of course, since I tossed the boxing, there is no returning the Sabrent. I therefore spent $23 on a brick, although it won't break me. This case of infant mortality is probably just a fluke, but an annoying one when it happens to you. I should have kept the box a while longer. My bad. UPDATE 1/2118: To Sabrent's great credit, and this is going back about 2.5 years ago, they stepped in and replaced the enclosure, no charge. I tested it but ran into issues trying to do the above formatting again, and threw it on my junk pile. With hindsight, I'm now realizing that the issue was most likely the hard drive I was using, which I got by ripping open a Western Digital external hard drive and removing it. There's something odd about the firmware in these drives. They're just "not right" when taken out of their manufacturer's shell and fully exposed like this. I think my issue was the hard drive, and NOT Sabrent. Coupled with their excellent customer service, I've now increased the rating to five stars. Because ... I just bought some 8TB Hitachi hard drives and it was time to format them, again with encryption. These are new, bare hard drives from Amazon, not something I ripped out of an external HD box! Fortunately, I still had the Sabrent enclosure, so I pulled one off the pile, attached the 12V/1.5A power adapter to it, put the 8TB drive in, connected to my Mac Mini, and just like that, the hard drive mounted on the desktop. I formatted it in HFS+, then created a new encrypted disk image, and let it run. This time, all went well. I discovered that if you open Sierra's Activity Monitor and click on Disk Activity, you get a readout of how fast the data is moving across the interface. I was seeing it move between 110 - 160 MB/sec, averaging about 130 MB/sec. That's not bad at all on my 2012 iMac with a 4-core i7 processor running Sierra (12.6). It's not the fastest i7 there is, so you have to remember that there are calculations that first have to be made before the data can be spit out of the USB3 ports for writing. That takes time to execute, which has to slow transfers down somewhat. USB of any speed never hits its theoretical maximum anyway (4.8Gbps for USB3, or about 600 MB/sec). Considering I was getting only 25 MB/sec with USB2 on this same machine (theoretical maximum speed = 60 MB/sec), actual speeds are less than theoretical speeds by about the same factor for each version of USB. The full 8TB of writing took 17 hours, which averages out to 130 MB/sec, consistent with what I see in Activity Monitor. I would say that's pretty good. I'm happy. Side note: I got to wondering about Sabrent's advice to run a firmware update. I'm a Mac guy, but I have an old PC running XP. I thought I would take a stab at the upgrade. I downloaded it to the PC, but the update would not run at all. You tell it to RUN the update and nothing happens. My neighbor has a PC running Windows 10, so I took the dock, power supply, and a USB cable to his place. He downloaded the update to his PC, followed the .pdf instructions exactly, the interface presented is NOT what the .pdf shows, but tried running it anyway. Same issue: hit the RUN button and nothing happens. It doesn't freeze or anything like that. It simply does nothing. So much for that! The key point I'm making is that this same dock that I bought 2.5 years ago (August 2015) easily sees my 8TB drives, runs flawlessly, and runs quite fast, all with no firmware update whatsoever. I don't understand Sabrent's statement that older docks (2.5 years old?) without an update are limited to 4TB. Not mine! I do not understand why other commenters can't get it to work right. It works perfectly for me. Considering Sabrent's great customer support, excellent USB3 performance, full support for an 8TB drive, and it's very low price, I gotta give it 5 stars! UPDATE 1/30/2018: Plugging into two different iMacs running Snow Leopard (10.6.8), neither can see any drive plugged into it. Odd, since at one time it could/did. I don't know what the difference is, but if you're running Snow Leopard, you might consider passing on the Sabrent. UPDATE 2/12/2018: Okay, so the Sabrent isn't happy with Snow Leopard. Separately, I plugged the Sabrent into my 2012 Mac Mini w/i7 processor and running Sierra (12.6). I plugged a second, different external USB3 drive enclosure to another port, loaded a pair of 8TB X300 Toshiba hard drives in each, and proceeded to move data from one drive to the other. Measured speed is about 130 MB/sec, which is about max transfer rates that these hard drives can deliver. No complaints!

I had an external Seagate drive stop powering on. I did everything I could think of to get it to power up again, had some stuff on it I didn't want to lose. As a laast ditch effort I got this Sabrent enclosure and busted the Seagate hard drive out of it's enclosure. This Sabrent enclosure worked! What a relief! Very worthwhile purchase.

I had a difficult time getting the docking station to work. At first I thought it was software, but I finally figured it out - the old hard drive I installed worked itself loose from the internal docking port when I moved it. It works fine now, however, I make it a point not to move the enclosure. I realized that there is no locking mechanism or detent in the docking station to keep the hard drive fully engaged and securely pinned into the SATA port. I discovered that moving the enclosure can loosen the drive from the pin port, thereby disconnecting the drive from the computer. The design should be revised to include a cam locking mechanism similar to Sarbrent's docking station for SSD (which I have had for several months and works well). Otherwise, I would give the docking station 5 stars.

This docking station works exactly as expected. It’s easy to set up—just plug in the hard drive, connect via USB 3.0, and it’s ready to use. Transfer speeds are very fast, and it recognizes both 2.5” and 3.5” drives without any issues. I like the lay-flat design; it keeps my desk tidy and makes swapping drives really simple. No strange noises or overheating so far. Overall, a solid and reliable tool if you need quick access to multiple HDDs.

Seem solid and good quality, easily insertion of the hard drive (truly tool-free), supports my 20TB hard drive. The speed was a bit higher than I expected (250MB/s writing, and a bit better in reading, connected to an M2 MacStudio, so I think USB4?), so fine for backups and activities that don't require an SSD.

EZ setup: Plug in power, slide in disk, connect supplied cable to USB port, turn on. Disk recognized and appears almost immediately in File Explorer (Win11 Pro). Searched old stored hard drives -- Samsung SATA SSD and two WD Hard Drives -- to find needed old files. Fast data travsfer. Recuva utility worked on all. SSD had to be inserted at a slight upward angle. Hard Drives slipped straight in. Drives heat up, but not abnormally.

Ease of set up, and it worked perfectly. Recommend to any one.

システムのバックアップには最適です。排熱も問題ないと思いますが、最近は気温が高いのでそのへんは各自調整していくのが良いでしょう。なにより、引っ越しソフトウェアがダウンロード可能なのが良好。使いながらレビュー追加していきます。

Excellent drive bay

To connect old drives to extract old data back. 3.5 and 2.5 drives are not an issue

Sehr gut verarbeitet und auch eine zuverlässige Schnelle und Stabiele Verbindung. Reinstecken und loslegen. Keine abbrüche während des kopieren. Getestet über 37 Stunden dauer Betrieb im Schreibvorgang. Durchgehend bei 112 MB/s schreiben. Das Einziege was ich bemängeln muss ist die Fehlende Kühlung ,da wär ein Lüfter vom Vorteil. Getestet mit einer 16TB Ironwolf Pro. Diese wird im Betrieb sehr Heiss bei fehlender Kühlung was die Lebensdauer verkürzt. Ich lasse es daher mit einem Selbstgebauten Lüfter zusätzlich von hinten kühlen bei offener klappe was super funktioniert. Denke aber das es bei kleineren Festplatten nicht benötigt wird. Kann diese Docking Station sehr empfehlen. Kühlung wird auf jedenfall bei Größeren Festplatten benötigt.