StarTech.com Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator, External Dual Bay USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) / eSATA to 2.5/3.5" SATA III HDD/SSD Cloner/Copier, Hard Disk Docking Station, Cloning/Recovery (SDOCK2U33RE),Black

Over the years, I have seen many product names come and go. So far, everything I have run across from this company StarTech has really been a good quality item for the price.You can find many other cloners and I am sure for a cheaper price, but the experience I have had with ST, i bought this one.- Good quality -- Nice and heavy for what looks to be plastic.- No issues, worked like a charm- Tested cloning a 250gb drive to a 500gb drive that was a standard boot mbr. Threw the clone in the machine and it booted up without issues.- Win7 self loaded a driver when hooked to the pc and the device then acts like a dock to access the drives via usb 3.0- Easy to clone. Plug the source in the source slot HDD2 (yes, source is slot 2 in the one i received and i have no idea why they would do that. Logic would have you thinking to clone 1 to 2, not 2 to 1) and the destination disk into slot 1. Make sure the pc/copy button is red for copy and press the button. Wait some time and bam, it is done. Take note that this takes some time. This is not done by wiggling your nose and snapping your fingers. Your fingers will be broken by the time it is done. With 2 drives at 7200 spin SATA 3gbps, the 250gb drive was done in just under 40 minutes by my count. Throw a nice 2gb combo at the same speeds and you might want to just go eat dinner and watch a movie.Only one small thing that is becoming less of a big deal every day; IDE drives. No access to clone older IDE drives as this is for SATA only. At work, I have a lot of older pcs with IDE only. We are using every instance of trouble to simply upgrade pcs which all have SATA anyway but if i needed a quick access to a disk, it would be nice to have it here. There is an option priced on Amazon here at $18 or so that provides a dongle to fit right in this device, giving access to IDE. You need this option, a pair of these might be worth it or then find another option with this built in.Part of the reason i bought this one is that we use the StarTech 2 bay dock to access disks on the desk now as it is and enjoy the quality there as well. I bought this one for the office and may consider one for home with the option of cloning out a large windows drive that is simply ready.Good product and worth the money in my opinion.Update: 12/14/2015 - This device works great, but I did find one snag that most people will not run into, but I sure did; HPA partitions. What you do not see listed is that this will not copy a HPA partition. These partitions are used for older pcs that needed instructions on how to handle larger discs in regards to ATA and were also used for security purposes. If you are trying to clone a disk with one of these and it is the only hard drive left alive with a dead vendor, you are screwed.Now for the good news; StarTech rocks. I only took a survey and man, they were on top of things fast. Not only did they contact me to make sure my needs were fulfilled and why they were/were not, they made the whole situation right by making sure I got the right device that could do so. I offered to send this one back to compensate them back and they said "keep it, you might still use it".Class company that is certainly focusing on customer service and that says a lot of their character and how they do business.

Coulnd't believe it was actually THAT easy but it was. Put my old mech drive in the source bay and the new SSD drive in the target bay, clicked copy and the next morning it was done. When my computer first booted up, it did run into an issue but it caught it, rebooted and everything is working great.

This Startech HD duplicator (SDOCK2U33RE) worked well. (BTW,I have found all the Startech products I've used over the years are good quality.)I used it to clone a 4GB drive, a process that took about 7 hours. The cloned drive was perfect. And the process was easy once I understood how to do it.My one criticism is that I think the instructions could be made more clear and I do not understand why Startech doesn't have short video on their website that explains the process. It would have made it so much easier to get started and to understand how to use this device. Everything is very simple -- AFTER the first time you use it.Here are two things that I did not fully understand:1. You cannot clone a drive unless the drive is REMOVED FROM THE COMPUTER. A computer is not involved in the cloning process. You just insert your old HD into slot 2 and your new drive into slot, push a button to get into the right mode (red light on) and then push "start." (Just to be clear: "Cloning" is a process to create an identical copy of your old HD. My computer had a drive that was getting flaky so I removed it, cloned it, and installed the new HD back into the computer and got back into Windows without any problems or blips.)2. The unit can be connected to a computer to copy files -- but not to clone a drive. So, you can use it to backup files from your computer onto another HD -- which is a great feature.You should also note that while cloning, the drives got quite hot. I used a small desk fan to keep them cool. Not required but a good idea.

I does connect and work as described for mounting and access hard drives. Unfortunately, there is a single USB bus and if you eject one HDD the other is disconnected even in use. On Mac this results in volume improperly ejected messages. The only solution is to complete work on both HDDs, eject both, turn off the unit, swap the HDD(s) and turn the unit back on. This does not fit my work flow requirements and I will be returning it. I did not test the stand-alone duplicate feature.

If anyone has a hard drive that needs to be cloned, this is what is needed to accomplish everything successfully. I had a Kingston ssd that was eleven years old on a desktop and it was running very slow. I cloned the drive with a new Samsung and everything booted perfectly and ran much faster. I did a couple of reboots and everything was all good.

For work I have to prepare drives for systems. We have a program that is used to load the drives - takes forever. Now, with this, takes about 10 minutes to copy a drive. I just keep a master of each system and pop it in before I am leaving and I have a drive ready to go. Really a great time saver. I have used it with both SSDs and regular hard drives - both are great.