SHARKOON SATA QuickPort Duo for SATA HDD (2.5 inch and 3.5 inch)

Used this for a couple of years now. Worked reliably. The controller on board is only Sata 1.5 Gbit/s, which means real-world max throughput is about 130MB/s (I have tested this with the Crucial M4 ssd via an internal Intel 6.0Gbps sata port).

So my last cheap enclosure plays up after 30 mins.. I start to research a replacement and I am swapping out my massive ATX tower running Linux and moving to a Mac mini. I have 8 Sata drives ranging from 1tb to 320gb. So event if I find another cheap enclosure for 20 quid it would cost be 160 quid to use them all.

After a lot of research I choose this unit. It takes two drives and whilst the bandwidth for USB2 is limited it is compatible with all of th devices I use at home and at work.

The unit is a light but well built black unit which can accept both 3.5 and 2.5 inch sata drives it comes with two esata, one USB and a power cable. You just plug them in verticaly into the slots. There are two buttons on the unit which allow the drivs to be turned on and off.

Set of the unit really doen't require a manual.. Just plug the power in choose your interface type ( I use USB) very easy.

I chose a Only NTFS formatted 1tb drive first, plugged it in pressed the button and the Mac instantly spots the drive. I decided to reformat the drive as HFS+ (Mac Jouneled, Case sensitive, Unencrypted). This took 30 seconds. I then copied the contents of a remote 1tb drive of the network. This was quite slow and at the me time I plugged a 500gb drive into the other slot and backed up my mac mini using time machine. This as expected overwhelmed the USB2 band width and progress slowed even further.

So with the unit maxed out I left it running overnight for a burn in test.. I checked the tempreture of the drives with the back of my hand they got quite warm but not very warm. My burn in test completed after 16 hours with no failures with the unit, drives and mac.

So if like myself you have a lot of sata drives lying around this device is perfect for you. Be aware that if you need serious data transfer then USB2 is not going to cut the mustard. I can't comment on the esata performance because I don't have any way to test it but the specs are much more suited for copying large amounts of data in a short time.

Excellent device and great value or money..

This is a great bit of kit! One thing though, the two hard drives are only detected together via USB and not eSata. When connected via eSata only one hard drive is detected, so not sure if that's how it's meant to be.

Other than that, can't fault it as it works brilliantly.