ORICO 40TB USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III 4 Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5 inch HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [4 x 10TB]-6648US3

I have several multi bay drive boxes, each with 5 drives in it. While they have served well over the years, the cost of living crisis means I am unable to run these bays as often as I would like and I find myself having to try to plan which box I will have on and when. This is not a good situation. As they are all, solid bays it is a pain to remove and mount drives when I need them. The solution of course, is something like this, where I can plug in the drives I want on any particular day, and get on with tasks without struggling. Plus, being able to have between one and four drives helps my hugely. I can carry out basic maintenance and move stuff around from active to storage media. Also, and this is the big thing for me, I can reduce to cost of using the drives. So instead of having two stations with 10 drives running, I can now have one station - with 1-4 drives running, and only the drives I actually want to use at the time. Swapping out drives is as simple as waiting for activity to stop, turning the dock off, switching out drives, and turning it back on again. A matter of seconds where before I could be looking at up to an hour to switch things around. Plus, the other drive bays I was using, don't like not to be full. This one doesn't care. I does not object if I just have one or two drives mounted and running. Another big plus for this unit is it is so quiet. No fans spinning, no grinding, no hammering. Just nice quiet drives ticking away doing their thing. Heat is an issue though, This unit has no cooling facility, so no fans drawing the heat away, it is entirely reliant on air cooling as the large part of the hard drives are exposed. I've found a small USB desk fan that is extremely quiet and have that running blowing air over the drive to keep their temperature within tolerances. The cost of running the bays before became prohibitive over the 2022-23 winter, as electricity prices spiralled ever upwards. I wish to heck I had bought this then, as it would have enabled me to continue working without having to worry about the smart metre celebrating another lottery win. This unit would have saved me time, money and effort and I feel kinda stupid for not thinking of it before. I have used Orico products for the lasts six years and have found them to be reliable, well made and no frills units. No wizzy buttons or doodads, just basic functional tools and essential parts. I have only had a problem with one unit a couple years ago, and I still don't know what was wrong with it, but it was replaced without argument. This reliability and concentration on function rather than toys is why I decided to buy this dock instead of another, and because it is Orico and I'm happy with the products I already own. My only regret is not buying this earlier. It is simple, functional, well made, clean and efficient. It works precisely how you would expect and without fuss. A nice touch is the ability to clone drives for archiving and storing. That was always a chore in the past. While cloning is not quick, it is reliable and I don't have to spend time attending to the unit to make sure it's working. This one just works. Data transfer between drives is fast, smooth and problem free. I have managed to clean and organise several large drives without any fuss at all. Admittedly having a bunch of loose drives around is a nuisance, but I have now bought a proper fire-proof storage box for them which should make mirror and back up drives safer and my desk tidier. For me, this was definitely the best buy this year. Money well spent on a nicely made, clean and "works as advertised" piece of kit I should have got a while back. Thank you Orico, great piece of kit that will save me some serious money.

As others stated packaging came in makers box, no damage cause box was fit for purpose. Plugged in & working fine, can even edit in drive manager YES. Tx & Rx from 1 to another approx 40 to 50 mb/s. Worked with one of these from another maker, 1 drive bay (Has adaptor to fit older drive, which is handy), maxed out at 7 or 8 mb/s. These are handy to check HD's, I have loads of older drives & drives of lower capacity that I have replaced with larger drives, ( these are mostly SSD). Will update later once it has proved it's self. Had this many months, Nice, Tx rate is good, maybe maxing out my PC Tx rate, at times 80m/s, other times down to 14. This could be cause of the file type. Problems are possibly caused by win, sleeps & times it does not wake especially with 4 drives in action. Larger the common file type the better the Tx rate. I do not need or have the space for another. Recommended Yes, no setup needed. Now been in operation few years. With a good HD I can get 120 to 160 MB/s. Only change is in Win 11/12 update used to be able hot swop, now it resets the 4 drives.

So far so good - using it to house library and archive drives which are backed up to backblaze. not suitable for anything that requires quick access to large files due to slow read write speeds e.g. music production, gaming etc.

I use these docks to extend storage capacity on a PC that I use as a file server. Note that they do not have NAS or RAID capability, but are very effective for a JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks"). I originally purchased one more than a year ago to replace a dying external 4 bay enclosed dock. I have been very happy with it, so have now purchased a second one (and am contemplating a third). The PROs that I have noted are: No noisy fan; with USB3, SMART is supported on all bays; the passive cooling is surprisingly effective - even during heavy use, disks did not get too hot (although I was ready to use a small fan, just in case, but this was never needed - the original box it replaced would have gone into turbo jet fan mode); changing disks is simple - no fiddling with screwdrivers, etc. The CONs: While it does accommodate the smaller 2.01cm height HDDs (e.g. Seagate ST4000DMZ04), they tend to lean and are less physically stable then the standard 2.61cm ones. Easily fixed with a bit of packing, though; Because of their open nature, I do not consider a desktop suitable. Instead they should be placed a short distance away so that they will not be accidentally disturbed. You will need to purchase a longer USB cable (e.g. 2m), since the supplied cable is far too short. In a domestic situation, there will be some dust. However, I do not find this to be a concern: naturally some dust will settle. However, compare with an enclosure - there the box actively sucks the dust in! When changing disks, I would recommend first logically ejecting the complete device and then powering it down. The device and disks will then re-discover on powering back up. I cannot comment on the disk clone capability since I have never used it. All in all, a very effective and well priced device for my needs.

Love price but this product doesnt clone and speeds when 4 drives engaged is useless

Such a simple piece of kit for my old external hardrives. Just plug and play so simple, no loss of connection, very fast transfer rate. At just over £60 for a four bay unit, it's a great price for a great and an affordable piece of gear.

I bought this a while ago and populated it with a selection of my hard drives. The first thing to note is that it has been rock solid in that time. However, I did notice that the drives get quite warm, so I have pointed a fan at it. This also keeps dust off the drives. It's hard to believe that several terabytes of storage are needed by little old me, but here we are with all my photos on one, music on another, and dvds on yet another, with miscellaneous apps on the last. Off course everything has to be backed up to an offline system. It is much better than having everything in the desktop because if that has to be upgraded, the data storage can just be plugged into the new system

I found this docking station to be a good idea, nice that it could be used to dock 4 HD's. But it connected to my new mini pc only sometimes. Quite often I had to turn it all off and on again to get the connection to work. Passing data from the HD's to my pc was quite slow too. Much slower than when HDs were internal. It was easy to just slot HD's into the docking ports, but again, didn't always work, one docking port in particular I had to avoid because it just didn't work. By the time I figured it just wasn't worth using, I had gone over the 30 day return period. So I bought a much larger HD, connected the old drives to Sata ports on my pc, and transferred the files to the larger HD. So the docking station was a another waste of money lol.