HDD Docking Station 4TB+

[nutingut]

Can someone recommend me a HDD docking station, that works with 4TB+ disks? Thanks!

 

[phis6]

Try StarTech SuperSpeed USB 3.0 / eSATA Docking Station or BlacX 5G Snow Edition HDD Docking Station.

 

[nutingut]

Thanks, ordered

 

[Cerb]

I have the BlackX at work (but the plain black one, not snow), and the StarTech at home. Both work well. The BlackX is more stable (IE, stays standing up better, with top-heavy HDDs in it), but both work great.

 

[stlc8tr]

I have the BlackX at work (but the plain black one, not snow), and the StarTech at home. Both work well. The BlackX is more stable (IE, stays standing up better, with top-heavy HDDs in it), but both work great.

Can you use both the USB3 and eSATA ports on the docks?

Am curious because I have a USB3-only dock from Plugable and it's not compatible with my Vantec eSATA dock. Any disks that I format on one can't be used with the other.

 

[Cerb]

Not sure. I've never used the eSATA, as the main point was for USB (eSATA I can just plug in, with no dock, on my desktop). However, not reading a drive formatted in one on the other is simply, well, wrong. The data on the drive should be the same, regardless of device used, and should be able to be read from and written to just the same, regardless of device used.

The only way I can think of for that to happen is one device passing through 4K sectors, the OS using 4K sectors, and then the other device passing 512B. That would be quite the annoying bug.

A USB dock should show up as a USB to ATA bridge, or a USB to PCI/PCIe bridge (with an ATA controller attached).

 

[stlc8tr]

I think the issue is the type of partitioning scheme used. I haven't looked into it further but I think the USB3 dock uses an overlay scheme to make large drives compatible with older machines (since several partitions appear in Disk Management) so when I take a drive formatted on the USB3 dock and put it into the eSATA dock, Windows doesn't understand the overlay scheme being used. And when I format a drive on the eSATA dock, it uses a single large GPT partition that the USB3 dock doesn't understand.

I was wondering if this was a problem with the specific chipset being used (ASMedia 1051E) on the USB3 dock or if this was a problem with all USB3 docks.

 

[Cerb]

It's definitely that dock, and that is not a dock I would want to use. The dock itself should not understand partitioning schemes. It should pass a drive controller over USB to the OS, so that the OS can manipulate it the same as if it were an internal SATA controller.

It's common for external HDDs to do this, but not docks or dongles. At least, it shouldn't be, and I've been lucky enough to have no issues.

Such a thing would make a dock useless, from my POV.

 

[stlc8tr]

It's definitely that dock, and that is not a dock I would want to use. The dock itself should not understand partitioning schemes. It should pass a drive controller over USB to the OS, so that the OS can manipulate it the same as if it were an internal SATA controller.

But if a dock didn't do any type of overlay translation, wouldn't that make it incompatible with older machines?

This USB3 dock lets you use a large drive (3TB+) with older machines that aren't large drive aware.

 

[Cerb]

But if a dock didn't do any type of overlay translation, wouldn't that make it incompatible with older machines?

No. They'll work fine. You just would need to use MBR, limiting you to using 2TB of it, if you wanted to boot from it. For a data drive, only XP or older will be a problem.

This USB3 dock lets you use a large drive (3TB+) with older machines that aren't large drive aware.

Treating the drive as 4K would mean that if you then swap to another dock, or plug the drive in as an internal, it may not work right, when the OS only supports 512n or 512e (with aligned 512B addressing). So then what if I'm swapping the drive between internal and external installation (which is what I do)?

 

[stlc8tr]

No. They'll work fine. You just would need to use MBR, limiting you to using 2TB of it, if you wanted to boot from it. For a data drive, only XP or older will be a problem.

But that's the thing. With this dock, you can use a 3TB+ drive with older machines, with full access to all of the storage.