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Kyrgyzstan
1 Level
767 Review
39 Karma

Review on πŸ“ StarTech SDOCK4U33 - 4 Bay USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station with UASP, Supports 2.5" and 3.5" SATA SSD HDD, Multiple External Hard Drive Dock (Quad Bay, Black) by Benjamin Michels

Revainrating 5 out of 5

It has decent USB 3.0 speeds and works well as an external storage system - 9th September 2020 update

The perfect removable external storage system is hard to find USB 3.0 for my hard drive library. I bought it some time ago and now (August 2018) I finally decided to review it as I'm glad it has served me for so long. It works great with all SATA hard drives, although you have to be careful with Toshiba drives as they have some issues with removal. I get good speeds copying data back and forth and I average between 50MB and 60MB/s. with 7200 drives. Of course, if you use slower drives, you will notice slower speeds. From time to time I do hear vibrations, noise from drives and devices, but that's easily remedied with a small cloth (or a 15" x 15" microfiber cloth). ) on the hard drives and place 2 hard drives on the cloth. A very simple silencer. Also, I connected it to a separate 4-port PCI USB 3.0 card in the computer to avoid overloading the USB bus in the system and it works very well. The 4 blue LEDs are bright so you might want to put something on them if the bright light is too strong for you at night. Finally, I strongly recommend that you install a small fan that blows directly over the unit when you have all 4 bays full. With the 4 7200RPM drives I have, I can see that temperatures can reach 47C and above very easily. When the fan blows on it, the temperature of the panes fluctuates between 28-34Β°C.------------------------------ -- ---------------- --------------------------------- - -- --Updated September 9, 2020 - Since using these in 3 years I have only accessed 2 or 3 drive bays and thought one of my hard drives had died, an old Seagate 2TB. However, I have just bought 2 HGST 8TB drives and tried initializing them and I have confirmed that the rear left drive bay is dead now! I swapped drives while Crystaldiskinfo, Drive Manager and Windows File Manager were open when drives were removed and reinserted. So this has been going on for about 3 years and I just have to figure out how to work with 3 drives out of 4. I am currently in the process of initializing and running acceptance tests on these hard drives that I just purchased. These are HGST 8Tb drives that I bought off Ebay and they come from old servers that are around 22,000 hours old (3+ years). Crystaldiskinfo only shows 11 powerups on it, confirming that they were used in Dell servers and I got a decent $$ for them.

Pros
  • SATA III (6Gb/s) and UASP support for optimal performance
Cons
  • Available in black only