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Japan, Tokyo
1 Level
686 Review
67 Karma

Review on Cinolink Hard Drive Dock: USB 3.0 to SATA 2.5/3.5 Inch Docking Station with 3.3ft Cable - Supports 8TB HDD/SSD by Andrew Pickering

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Destroys the GPT partition of another hard drive if Seagate 3 TB is installed in one of the slots

This worked like clockwork for several months until I installed an old 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 hard drive in one of the slots. I have some hard drives and have run some tests. The dock quickly messed up the GPT table for the 14TB WB drive and the 3TB Toshiba drive when the 3TB Seagate was in a different slot. Damage occurs quickly and reproducibly; It didn't matter which slot the Seagate 3TB was in. I found another thread: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3D53KA2UBP29O/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0759567JT by someone else who had a similar issue and the GPT corruption on docs has narrowed down with the Asmedia chipset ASM1156. I suspect they are correct and that there is some kind of firmware bug with this chipset. This is of course conjecture and only occurs when I have a 3TB Seagate installed and can reproduce the issue repeatedly. Other drives were 100% fine when used in another dock or even in this dock unless a 3TB Seagate was installed. It could also be some kind of Windows 10 error, but I think most people don't want to buy the problem; only what works. This seems to be a problem for many products these days. The performance and features of this device are great; but I find hardware problems like this unforgivable and therefore the grade 1.

Pros
  • All right!
Cons
  • Too long to wait