What do you guys think of this Hard Drive docking station?

[Marcos]

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...mpaign=HDD3183




Sounds like a cool idea, but are SATA connectors alright with being plugged/unplugged like USB?

[Funkstar]

I bought this a while back

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=723367



Works well, I had a bunch of drives and data I was moving into a big NAS box, and didn't want to keep oving them in and out of regular external boxes.

SATA should be hot swapable, you should still safely remove the hardware in windows though.

[peterb]

looks neat - I wouldn't want to plug/unplud SATA drives frequently (wear on the connectors) SATA is hot pluggable, but you need a controller on the MOBO that supports that feature. However as this is a USB device anyway, thgat shouldn't be a problem

The gotcha is (as Funkstar says) is that you should unmount the disk (logically) by using the unmount (linux) command or the windows remove hardware command because most OS's use delayed write - using the correct command ensures that the write buffers are flushed and the disk written to. You can then hot unplug. (The same is true for any USB storage device)

[aidanjt]

There's a new version of that thing with eSATA, which is a lot more robust and performs far better than USB if your motherboard supports it. As for SATA contacts, they're physically built pretty much like USB contacts, so they should be fine. As peterb meantioned, the most annoying part is the default writeback mounting mode of most operating systems that require you to click around a bit before removing a disk or risk data corruption.

[Funkstar]

I actually forgot mine is USB only too.

There is a version out there that has USB, eSATA, Firewire and a multi card reader in the base too. Gets a bit over expensive with all that stuff in there though.

[pauldarkside]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=810288

Yep, nearly a tenner more. Looks good though.

[aidanjt]

Worth it imo. You could pay more for a card reader by itself.