Review on 💾 Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station | 2.5/3.5in HDD, SSD | Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function | Support up to 10TB (EC-HD2B) by Chad Carter

I needed something like this to sort through the bare discs I had lying around. This docking station is good for docking two drives. I'm glad I spent a little more on the two bay version. I bought it mainly for disk cloning, including block cloning of failed disks. The docking station has built-in cloning capabilities that do not require a computer. Sounds great right? Just set it up and let it do an offline cloning process. The problem is that there is no way to determine if a cloning operation will cause read errors, which are common with failed drives. So you have to guess if there is a problem depending on how long the process takes. The gauge shows an approximate percentage of progress, but that doesn't help much if the gauge doesn't change. The best way to clone drives is to use block-level cloning software that reports read errors. So you insert two drives, the original in bay A and the empty one in bay B, turn on the dock and open the software. Any high level tool like OSX Disk Utility will show both devices with the dock make/model if the volumes are unformatted. If you look closely you can find different IDs for disks if, like mine, none of them have a mountable filesystem (diskutil shows disk3 and disk6 for mine). So what is the original and what is a blank copy? Does bay A appear with a lower drive ID than bay B? The only caveat is that using this dock for cloning should be done with caution. Offline cloning does not stop and does not report read errors. Using it for online clones has other complexities that are probably common to all dual-dock products like this one. Beyond that, it's a well-built docking station that I'll no doubt use extensively.