Question what's a reliable ext hdd dock?

[luv2liv]

i got this dual hdd ext dock and i can confirm it is lousy. the drives auto disconnect and reconnect almost every hour.
is there a reliable one for 2 or even 4 drives? love this fast access design so we can easily yank/swap drives out as need.

 

[igor_kavinski]

$99: https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Drive-USB-C-Dual-Solution-OWCTCDRVDCK/dp/B07KRKBTXG/

$78: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KILQOG0/

I would go with OWC. Looks to be built better.

 

[Tech Junky]

Yottamaster makes a variety of enclosures that work well according to the reviews.

Mediasonic also makes a couple of decent options as well.

 

[Charlie98]

I've had a Xigmatek dock for a few years... it's fantastic. Granted, it's only a single. For that matter, I don't see anyone selling them... so it may be a moot point. 🙁

 

[bigboxes]

Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Duplicator - USB 3.0 (NST-DP100S3)

 

[mindless1]

These all seem very expensive to me, considering the last several drives I've bought, were cheaper coming in a USB external enclosure, with a wall wart PSU no less, than if I bought same capacity bare drive... so they were essentially paying me to take an external enclosure.

I know the reason, data blah center blah cloud blah demand blah blah. Regardless, I've now had external drives old enough to have aged-out/failure and enclosures to reuse. Since the enclosure is like protective shell I'd want for a bare HDD anyway if I was swapping them in and out, I feel like external docks are not so useful any longer, except those that are standalone and clone drives, for certain computer/corp business operations that do a lot of cloning.

luv2liv, what is your use case? I find it just as fast to simply unplug a USB3 enclosure based drive, if not just disabling in the OS, or having it on a USB hub with switched ports so can just switch that port off.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I've been pretty happy with my $30 Wavlink HDD docking station/duplicator, except that it doesn't have good documentation. It has worked fine for me popping in older drives to back up or consolidate data.