Inateck Aluminum USB 3.0 To SATA Dual-Bay USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Clone Function for 2.5 Inch & 3.5 Inch HDD SSD SATA I/II/III), Support UASP & Tool-Free(Fd2102)

Since most reviews for these devices seem to include phrases such as "have not tested the clone feature", I would like to say that I bought one of these pretty much solely for that. The ability to use it as a docking station is secondary for me but the standalone cloning feature was key. And it works, perfectly so far and is easy to operate. How fast it works depends on the slowest link in the chain which for me is always going to be the traditional HDD's I am migrating onto SSD. As an indication, the last drive I cloned as a 4 year old 2.5" WD 1TB drive onto a 2TB Samsung QVO SSD which took a little over 3hrs to complete. This is in line with my estimation based on the throughput of the source HDD which wasn't particularly fast even by 2015 standards. The resulting cloned drive worked perfectly with the unused space remaining as "Unallocated" in Windows. If I wanted to I could expand the used partition into that or create a new partition there, however in this case I am leaving the unused space as an over-provisioning area to maximize the performance and life expectancy of the SSD. Please note that cloning a drive makes an exact copy of the partition(s) so this box on its own cannot take say a 500GB drive with only 200GB used and "clone" it onto a 240GB SSD, although you could use it as a docking station for those drives and use a host PC and software (such as Macrium) to achieve this.Once the cloning process has finished this device suspends the drives gracefully and waits for you to turn the power off and remove them. The unit allows for 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives.As a side note, the styling on this is conservative with the aluminium trim adding a little elegance to the box itself. Everything fits together nicely with no loose or sharp edges. Please note that the plastic cover supplied with the unit isn't just to protect it in transit, it is intended to be used as a dust cover when not in use to stop the SATA connectors inside from fowling, so do not throw this away (there is a little label on the cover explaining this).

My old laptop died (pretty sure the processor packed up) and while I'd backed up everything I couldn't do without, I had a ton of personal files, films, music, saved game files, and other junk that I wanted if at all possible. Not wanting to pay for expensive data recovery for that, I took a punt on this. Worked effortlessly with my last hard drive. Also works with an older hardrive that I thought was likely irretrievable. It's pure and simple plug in and play. Personally, I have no need for the offline clone function so haven't attempted that to see if it works well. What it has done is allowed me to gain the equivalent of around 1.6TB of external harddrive space in storage for thirty odd quid, while rescuing some music I never thought I'd find again.As far construction, the metal case feels very sturdy, and the USB cable is quite thick and not at all flimsy. The plastic flap which folds down as you insert the hard drive is a little small and seems a bit pointless, but it doesn't obstruct the insertion of my drives (both from laptops, both 2.5's I believe). To me that's such a minor point as it does nothing regards functionality so I won't take a star off for it.I couldn't really be happier with the product given that it does exactly what I hoped it would.

Pretty good, but the power saving function is annoying.This Inateck dock has generally very good performance (fast and reliable data transfer), but it has a hardcoded power saving function that cannot be disabled. This spins down the hard drives every 30 minutes resulting in horrible system lockups every time you try to read or write to the drive after it has been spun down (due to the operating system having to wait for the drive(s) to get back up to speed). This aggressive power management is not good for the hard drive's hardware over the long-term (because it stresses the drives unnecessarily due to the constant spin downs, head parking, and subsequent spin ups) as well as subjecting the drive to power surges every time the drive is started back up.Obviously this is not a problem for SSD drives with no moving parts, although you are still subject to the system hangs and delays while waiting for the drive to be woken up.I never had this problem on my old StarTech dock, despite it being connected over USB3. It was always immediately available with no hangs, and it would power off only when my laptop went to sleep or was it was switched off. Having said that, there are other brands of USB docking stations that have sleep timers set to about 10 minutes, which is ridiculous, so at least the Inateck is not as bad as that.Edit: I have since been contacted privately by the manufacturer (completely unprompted) who was concerned that my experience with their product was not as good as they would have hoped. They offered me a deal, and also took on board the issues that I had raised above. So, I cannot fault Inateck's customer service, and it certainly inspires confidence in the reputability of this company.