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Recently we started upgrading all of our hard drives in our PC’s and Macs at work with Samsung Evo/Pro Solid State Drives. Normally we have these installed and ready before we hand them to our users but some still have the manufacturer hard discs which makes them unbelievably slow!

Now I had to upgrade someone’s machine but wanted to do it the fastest and laziest way possible (in IT, it’s what we do). I ordered in an external caddy and what a piece of kit it is. It is easy to setup with only two cables: a type A-B USB connection and a power brick. Just plug and play and forget about it. The beauty of this device is that it can accommodate both 2.5” and 3.5” discs and has a cover which hinges down to allow the installation of bigger drives. Instead of having a gaping hole in the top which not only looks unsightly, the cover prevents dust gathering in the recess where the SATA connections are.

It is surprisingly unobtrusive for a docking station, we have all seen some drive bays as behemoths because they have integrated power supplies, but I think having the power external benefits it in that you can tuck it away and have just the matt black plastic and aluminium body on show.

Windows automatically installed the device driver for it and now whenever a hard drive is docked it registers it as an external disc, even better when you consider that it has hot-swappable capacities. A fantastic idea if you make regular backups and store the discs offsite, which you should be doing anyway right? I have tested it on a Mac Mini and cloned the drive to the new SSD and had no issues. In fact, it was a bit faster than on my Windows box where I did a Windows drive clone. Obviously if you want to use a drive from a Mac in a Windows environment you need additional software for Windows to recognise the file system but the premise is still the same.

One thing you should bear in mind however is that the target drive must be larger than the source disc, an easy oversight which could save you a headache or two.

Another great feature is the power switch. I know, something so simple which is in our everyday life is often missed by loads of tech. I hate seeing lights of devices either in a standby mode or blinking when they’re not in use for two reasons. I do like to try and be environmentally friendly and switch things off but I also have a number of hubs and printers on my desk which are on shining lights at me, to have one less means less of a distraction.

Speed wise if you have this running in a USB 3.0 port you can (in theory) get data transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps. I cloned a drive with some third-party programme which had used about 90Gb of storage and optimised it for a 120Gb SSD in about 20-30minutes.

That is one criticism that I do have and that is that there is no software bundled with the Caddy. All you get is just the docking station and the cables themselves, it isn’t a major issue but you will have to try and source some software to clone or backup.

Tecknet also make a dual docking station in which you can put two comparable drives and clone one to the other without the need to be connected to a PC

For £20 on Amazon it has proven to be one of the most valuable tools in my support kit and I would not be without it.

Written by: Jason Turner

Author

Paul Wright

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