MA, you happen to have a link for such a docking station - sounds interesting but I have not seen one yet.You can get a plastic stack of drawers in Walmart for about $10 to store 1/2 dozen bare drives in. It's very cool. I had USB 3.0 docking stations for both my desktop machines. Plus you can leave a drive in the dock as a data drive. Not to mention an SSD for fast video muxing, if you're into video conversion stuff.
The USB 3.0 docks I had were SIIG that worked with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. They were expensive as USB 3.0 was new when I got them. Around $50 ea. Now I'm told it's perfected such that the $20 and under docks work fine. The SSD I used was a Kingston that was probably going extinct. I got a good deal on Egg. I think it was a 90 GB SSD for about $70.
edit: the USB 3.0 did not max out the sequential read/write speeds of the SSD. But the drive still got great random read/write. So for muxing video with source and destination on the SSD, it kicked ass.
No, I bought it. They are designed to fit in standard filing cabinet drawers. It wasn't cheap, either, but it's made of anti-static foam so I don't have to store the HDDs in the anti-static sleeves; that makes handling far more convenient, easpeially since I also don't have to juggle them HDDs to see find the one I want. The 18 holer like what I have can be bought here and a 24 holer here (sounds like I'm referring to super outhouses). I originally ordered the 18 holer but the company I bought it from (the HenFruit company was out at the time) ran out after I had made the order. They offered to let me have the 24 holer for the same price as the 18 holer or I could cancel the order. Needless to say, I was all over the 24 holer offer like stink on skunk. It was too big for the drawer I was going to put it in but a minute with a hand saw fixed that minor detail.
The black thingies in some of the holes are spacers I made from some additional anti-static foam I bought so I can conveniently store 2.5" HDDs as well as 3.5".
The anti-static gloves are because I'm such a shocking person. All seriousness aside, I have a huge problem with static electricity in my house because of the vinyl floor tiles and the dry climate I live in; winters are especially bad. I can literally turn on some of my CFLs very briefly by touching a pull chain for the light switches. In fact, I have killed the electronics in a couple of CFLs while installing them. I've learned to be very religious about grounding myself before touching anything. I also pick up something metallic, such a key or a coin, and grounding myself through it to reduce the bite of the zap (I HATE! getting zapped). Even with the anti-static gloves, I first touch a pull chain that's close to my computer, then the computer case itself—I generally wear just one glove—before inserting or removing a HDD from a swap bay with the gloved hand.
Even faster than USB 3.0 external docks are some of the ones that connect via e-SATA, depending on if they run at SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0 speeds. I have an older one that uses either USB 2.0 or e-SATA. On USB 2.0, it is as fast as a dead dog but on e-SATA, it sails along at a pretty fair clip. I haven't actually measured the speed but the dock on e-SATA is clearly much faster than USB but appears to be slower than my internal docks.
What I like about my internal docks is they use no electronics so each one is essentially a pass-through directly to a SATA 3.0 port on my HBA card and I don't have to horse around with cables and separate PSUs.
I haven't seen those before. I have only got 3 drives so not much point. They look attractive in pink, though.
Pretty expensive for a bit of foam.
True that! Still, for my needs, I felt the price was worth it.
I suspect a lot of hand labor goes into making them (they are made of several laminated layers) and I know for a fact that anti-static foam isn't cheap. In fact, there is a rather negative review on one of them carping about the price. Not only did the reviewer not purchase the "egg crate" (my term for lack of a better, more concise term), I suspect his free alternatives (which, for most people, aren't going to be as easy to obtain as he claims) aren't anti-static since new drives are normally shipped in an anti-static sleeve, negating the need for anti-static foam. I wanted anti-static foam so I wouldn't have to horse with anti-static sleeves. These "egg crates" are definitely a niche product.
Ask a rule of thumb benchmark I like to copy a file of some size. Like maybe a GB or 2. Also use Crystal Disk Mark. The SIIG claim 5 Gb/s max rating. CDM sequential read/write typically around 120+ MB/s if the internal in the dock is Sata III. For instance WD Caviar Black 1 TB. I guess the throughput isn't all that much higher in reality as I seem to remember the SSD only doing a bit better than that on sequential. But of course the random access was phenomenal.
Strangely enough when I plugged my Seagate 500 GB external USB 2.0 drive into the SIIG while waiting for the USB 3.0 docks to arrive, I got about a 15% increase in sequential throughput. Instead of large single file copies at about 24 MB/s they came in consistently at about 32 MB/s. Weird. But I'll take it.
This Laptop has one USB 3.0 port but I haven't copied a large file. Only USB 3.0 thing I have to plug into it is a USB 3.0 key drive from AData. So I can't really compare. :)
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