Inateck FD2002 Dual Bay USB 3.0 HDD Docking Station Review Mar13

Inateck FD2002 Dual Bay USB 3.0 HDD Docking Station Review

The Inateck FD2002 is a dual-bay USB 3.0 HDD docking station. It’s plug and play, doesn’t require drivers and most interestingly has a built-in, offline clone function at the press of a button. Put drive into slot A, another into slot B (drive B must be equal or greater in size to drive A), press the clone button and it will copy the data over automatically (all you need to do is power the device, no computers required).  Here’s the specifications from Inateck: Product Type Inateck FD2002 Weight 410 g / 0.903 lbs Offline Cloning Supported Supported Capacity Up to 4 TB Color Black Supported Drives 2.5″/3.5″ SATA I/II/III HDD/SSD Interface USB 3.0 Material Plastic Hot Plug, Plug & Play Supported Licenses CE, FCC Measurements 150 x 109 x 60 mm (L/W/H) 5.91 x 4.29 x 2.36 in (L/W/H) Operation Environment Storage: -40 to 70 °C; Operation: 5 to 55 °C OS Support XP/Vista/7/8(32/64-bit), Mac OS, Linux As someone who has worked on the bench and regularly tests hardware for not only benchmarking/performance purposes but maintenance as well, the FD2002 strikes me as an handy tool to have on-hand, especially if you’re in the business of swapping out and dealing with hard drives in bulk. The USB 3.0 “super speed” interface provides transfer rates and latencies comparable to a normal SATA connection.  Hell, it even beat out the old Maxtor drives (left) I have inside my primary workstation:   We used a pair of Seagate ST2000DL 2TB hard drives for our tests, which are 5900 RPM green drives. To see speeds like this out of a hard drive, let alone one running at a lower speed AND is attached externally is quite impressive. The Inateck FD2002 utilizes USB-attached SCSI (UAS) over traditional Bulk-Only Transport (BOT)...