Review on Syba CL ENC50060 Docking Station Backup by Aaron Moore

I have a 6TB 3.5 inch hard drive with various contents that I want to copy to a new 8TB drive. I then use the dock to store these two drives as external hard drives for my 2012 Mac Mini (quad-core i7 with Sierra), the station offered by Revain, and that's it, despite being advertised for PC (the cloning software offered is for PC only), I went ahead knowing that if it was USB it would work fine on a Mac. everything, connected the dock to my min with the included USB3 cable, plugged in the included 12V power adapter, put a 6TB drive in the "SOURCE A" slot and a new 8TB drive in the " TARGET B” slot (although I don't think the order of placement is important for my purposes) and then ON/O. Rear FF switch. I heard each drive spin up and soon the 6TB drive was installed on the desktop and the new drive indicated that it needed to be initialized. It will launch Disk Utility, if you click "Initialize" you will tell DU to erase and format the drive. After about 15 seconds, the formatting is complete and the new drive is ready for use. I dragged and dropped the files on the 6TB drive to be copied to the 8TB drive, and this started the copy process. During copying, the small status indicator on the front panel flashes red/green. Ideal! The remaining LEDs on the front panel remain off. All this took no more than 5 minutes. I'm a lucky tourist. I measured the transfer speed with the timer function on my watch and observed a transfer of 80GB in 853 seconds, which translates to about 94MB/s transfer between drives. Some will say "This is too slow!" However, note that the data must first be read from the source disk and then written to the destination disk. All these "ping-pong operations" must be done using a single USB3 cable between dock and Mac. Of course, this slows down the whole process. This is how USB3 works. I've measured transfer speeds of these drives approaching 120MB/s with a simple direct data dump, but at the time I used two separate cases with two separate USB3 cables for my Mini. Therefore, the relatively low bit rate does not surprise me. I think this is pretty much in line with expectations in terms of speed since it's a dual dock. In addition, when the transfer is complete, I access the data one disk at a time, so the reading speed is faster. Key takeaways from my experience: 1) works great on Mac Mini with Sierra 2) handles 6TB and 8TB drives just fine 3) acceptable transfer speeds are just under 100MB/s when moving data between two drives that are connected to two slots. The included PC software is useless on a Mac, so I immediately threw it away. I will never use the clone button. In fact, I'm scared if I ever click on it unintentionally. Just in case, I intend to hack the device and disable the switch. All in all, it's a great little dual dock, especially for the money, and it's great for my purposes. Mac users have nothing to worry about when using it.