I have what is considered a poor man's RAID configuration -- a primary hard drive that is mirrored regularly to another drive. Since external drives tend to be more expensive than internal ones, I bought this hard drive bay so I could treat internal drives as external. I can also continue to swap out drives with larger-capacity ones like they are game cartridges. This is a much cheaper option than an actual RAID enclosure and doesn't require any advanced software or configuration. Keep in mind that the operating system will treat the drives separately with their own drive letters. It's up to you how you want to use the space.

I did a little test and found that using the manual driving cloning feature is no faster than using a software-based backup app to mirror data between one drive and the other. Don't buy this thinking that it will rapidly clone multi-terabyte drives in minutes. It takes hours to clone the drives. Also, if your destination drive is larger than the source one, that additional space will not be partitioned. But you can extend the partition with free software available on the internet.

Honestly, this doesn't offer any more functionality than what I could get with a SATA-to-USB adapter and some backup software. But it does look nicer and reduces the number of cables I need to hook up multiple drives. It's convenient if you have multiple drives that you are regularly attaching to your PC or are looking for an easy way to duplicate data between two physical drives.

Great product! I had a bunch of SATA hard drives laying around, all good drives, but I upgraded all my computers to SSD. Now I can use my SATA drives for storage, backups, whatever I want, even for Virtual Machines. I've tested it on Windows platforms and Apple, both work great!

I have a virtual pinball machine. It is driven by a Windows computer. It can be sensitive to windows updates. Also, the software that makes the thing run gets updated frequently. I have tons of work into the machine and consequently what is on the hard drive. I have 3 or 4 drives that I rotate. Before I make a lot of changes, I pull the disk and copy it using this device. Fast and efficient and couldn't be easier. WAY better than a software clone. I have the drive mounted on the outside of the machine, so removing and putting back are easy. I have recommended this to many in the Virtual Pinball community. Lastly, I used to do lots of PC work for my wifes business. I WISH THAT I WOULD HAVE HAD ONE THEN!

So I bought this to clone a hard drive in an older Dell computer. After following the instructions the to clone the original to a second hard drive, I put the clone hard drive into the computer it would not boot. Not sure what happened. So I put both hard drives back in the docking station and used third party software in a different computer to migrate the operating system from the first to the second and then the second hard drive booted in the old computer. So 4-stars not 5.

This thing is great. allows you to swap drives in or out as need be if you deal with alot of large media files ect. It also has an offline drive cloning feature for copying one drive to another without using a computer.