Too easy to be true this Dual Drive HDD Clone Docking station??

Brian_Pamo

Hi all

A few of you may have seen some of my other posts regarding various stuff on old PC’s. Whilst sat with my can of Beer and glancing at how it’s made on the TV and browsing eBay (See! Guys can multitask) I came across this:
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ORICO 2.5"/3.5" USB 3.0 Dual Bay SATA HDD/SSD Hard Drive Clone Docking Station
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Now, going off the text I read and some other comments I picked up on does this device work as the advertising bumf implies? They way I have read it you simply remove a HDD from 1 machine and plug it in to the caddy. Then plug in your target and somehow the whole drive is copied? If so, I have some questions...
1. Does it ACTUALLY CLONE the whole image of the drive? If so why would anybody bother with products like Macrium etc? Surely it’s much easier to use one of these caddies than it is to buy a SATA to USB cable and then use Macrium (or similar) to clone the drive?
Might be an obvious question but am I missing something really obvious?  

Brian_Pamo

What I meant to say is...This item costs £30. Why would anybody fork out for cables etc and a subscription of drive cloning software IF this item can really clone a drive so easy. ?

jsmith9

It's actually very easy to clone a drive - all you have to do is read sector 1 / write sector 1 and repeat until the end!

reflect, acronis etc do have other functions which I suppose is why people use them

John_Gray

Probably worth you reading some of the 1- and 2-star reviews of this device on Amazon, which complain of data errors in operation.  This is a "your kilometreage may vary" situation.

Heedtheadvice

Just go with a tried and trusted method (Macrium Reflect or Acronis) no need for any extra cables if you do it in a PC with correct extra drive connection capacity....

....and then you can use the other functions too. ALL at no cost with the free versions. MSE save your £30 and lots of heartache.

If no PC available, use laptop with a caddy and then use it to host a backup drive

.........instead of a single use poolyr reviewed machine

forgotmyname

What happens with different sized drives. Will it resize the partitions?

What happens if it finds a bad sector?   You dont want it running for days as it keeps trying to

read it over and over.  Windows will keep trying, been there and done that. 16 Hours to copy

a 3MB file.. and it was corrupt anyway.

Some drives come with the backup/cloning software for free, I use Acronis (Free WD version) that

works as long as you have a WD drive in the system.  It doesnt need to be the drive your working

on you just need one in the system.

They have an ADATA Free version also. Maybe others. I had a link with my ADATA NVME drive

but didnt need it because i already have the WD version.

They may offer free versions for other drive manufacturers, not looked for a long time. Or get a old

cheap WD drive.  The ADATA one is only free with certain drives, you would need to check if

the drive is on the list.