Review on 💽 Alxum SATA Hard Drive Docking Station: Cloner and Duplicator for 2.5 & 3.5 inch SATA HDD/SSD up to 18TB - Black by Todd Cowdrey

I never write reviews. But this docking station is useless for disk cloning. I am a 25 year old computer expert. I've been in simulation technology for over twenty years and I can build some of the best and fastest computers from scratch. My experience goes back to almost every PC generation since the DOS era. Also, I'm a full-stack coder. Many people come to me for advice on computers, software, and programming. Now that I have all the bragging rights and credentials, people will listen to my review; I can summarize this device in three words: It's a BRICK! Two more words: AVOID! It can be used as a glorified powered USB3 drive holder to manually copy files from your computer. That's all he's good for. Otherwise, it's like a cloning device, rock or paper. The photos you see were taken after almost six hours of cloning a 120GB hard drive to a 500GB hard drive. Both SSDs. The original 120GB drive in slot A of the docking station only has about 25-30GB of data! Also, the original drive is a new build that doesn't contain any of my data other than the OS and various programs that I installed when I did a clean install of Windows. I used this new drive for about two weeks to see if there were any errors installing my operating system and programs. It worked smooth as silk. So I planned to use this 120GB drive hidden in a drawer as a source drive for future computer failures after cloning it to a larger Crucial 500GB hard drive. Nada. nope Does not happen. To rub salt in the wound, today is my second attempt at cloning this thing. It gets stuck at 25% as some other reviewers have written. I started at 8pm in the hotel lobby. It's 2:01 am as I type this sentence. The light hasn't moved an inch from 25% since 8 p.m. Last night had the same result. But last night I only spent 3 hours and it's still stuck at 25%. Even if you stop the process like I did last night, Windows doesn't recognize the hard drive at all. So you can't easily format the drive you want to copy in Windows to boot again because it won't be recognized as a hard drive at all. Bios sees it, but Windows doesn't. How to fix it? The old fashioned way. You'll need a Windows recovery disc, Windows bootable flash drive, or Windows recovery media, or another way to format the drive from the command line using diskpart. Otherwise, your target drive will also be bricked if you don't know how. Most people are afraid to solve this with command line, but it's not that hard. In fact, this is the best way to wipe and erase the original corrupted, unusable data written by this dock's firmware or by programs written to the chips. This whole process, along with re-wiping and re-partitioning the target drive to 500GB, takes another hour if you know how. Add more time if you don't. For me: 1/2 hour to physically separate it. And another hour to find the windows media, search for old commands, remove and reinstall hard drives on your computer, etc. I removed my good drive just in case because windows and bios remember when a drive won't boot, and sometimes it's just get confused when you have a good drive and an unreadable drive in the computer when you run the clean and split process in the command line and restart the computer. In summary, it would be much faster for me to use powershell or some other "old school" copy commands to recursively copy that amount of data over an old school USB1 port! Stay away from this device and model if you want to clone a drive. I hope this article will save many people. grief.