Review on 💾 WAVLINK USB 2.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Docking Station with 2 USB 2.0 HUB and Card Reader - Backup Functions, Supports up to 10TB Capacity by Brad Blake

They position this as a standalone clone dock, but it also works great as a dual-slot computer dock. I was a bit skeptical about buying it given the relative price compared to the competition, but given the price I thought it was worth the risk. Luckily the game paid off. I add USB-C to my old workstations so workstation accessories work with new laptops, motherboards and vice versa. I already have a Startech eSATA docking station, very similar to the Startech USB-C variant. The main difference between this device and the Startech USB-C docking station are the drive eject buttons and where they place the power and clone buttons and the lights. For me personally, for 3 times the money, having an ejector button wasn't a good deal. The box itself is as strong and cheap as Startech's. Once inserted, discs are easy to insert; You just have to pull them out to remove them. To be honest with the eject buttons I've always found the full 3.5 HDs to pop out like toast and just pop back in due to their weight. They don't snap or anything like that. I have connected this dock to an Aukey USB-C card (see separate review) as well as an MSI GS63VR laptop. They both took the device and connected the drives without much enthusiasm. A small red light will illuminate at the top of the ring to indicate power, which is not visible in the pictures. You'll see a blue light on the left and right, which also shows the link source and target drive (front drive). These lights occupy the areas 270-315 degrees and 45-90 degrees around the ring. The entire bottom half of the ring is dedicated to four other quadrants that light up during the cloning process. When disks are accessed, the corresponding disk indicator flashes. I have no idea how to get the pretty solid blue glowing ring shown in the photos. If you don't pay attention to the light, PC control is easy. Insert and access a disc. You can eject drives without the controller or device squeaking or alarming common with eSATA cards and docking stations. Basically, it looks like a USB dock. However, the device is treated as a single dock. So if you try to remove it using the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on the Windows 10 taskbar, the only option available is to remove the entire dock. You cannot eject just one disc. However, Windows didn't seem to mind if I just pulled one out. It looks like the drives are being treated as non-cached and hot-swappable. Cloning a drive from one to the other is about as difficult as placing both drives in the dock and pressing the button in the middle of the ring. The device only needs to be connected; It does not need to be connected to a computer. When you connect the dock to your computer, they provide rudimentary disk backup software. However, when I ran it on Windows 10, the bare drives didn't show up. The volumes must be mounted and accessible. Therefore, you cannot use a Windows PC with this software to clone Linux drives or macOS drives, for example. Using Paragon Hard Disk Manager solves these problems and is the application I use and recommend for cleaning and cloning drives. The price is reasonable and I honestly don't know why Startech costs so much. There aren't many USB-C connection options at this time, which might explain Startech's pricing model. The limiting factor for performance is the drives, not the USB bus, so you won't get killer performance from this dock that you can't get from an eSATA dock. However, as more and more laptops and motherboards come with USB-C, it's a very good and compatible device that works on many systems and offers a performance advantage if you're using very high quality SSDs or something that can push that limit. (1250MB/s). For example, the Samsung 830 SSD was able to reach speeds of around 330 MB/s. Therefore, I would recommend this drive if, like me, you regularly need to optimize, clone and erase HDDs and SSDs with multiple systems.