Cavalry SATA 2-Bay USB 2.0 Dock - EN-CAHDD2B-ZB - Drives Not Included!

Excellent way to use hard drives. This saves money - buy large capacity drives and just switch back and forth. This was well worth the money and I will most likely get another one when on sale.
 
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I have been using this setup now for almost a year and loved it at first. I had random problems I just attributed to other things but now it seems there is some inherent problems with these units. As some people mention the drives tend to get pretty hot. I am using a pair of Hitachi 500 Gig drives in mine. After awhile the drive vibration translated into external noise through whatever shelf you have these sitting on. I have mine on a sturdy wood shelf but after being on for hours I get a sort of rattling from the base to the shelf. But the big problem is the drives seem to randomly disappear from my system and I have to unhook the USB cable, power cable then hook them back up to cure the problem. The main reason I bought this unit was for unattended, automated backups, well most every day now I come into my office with a "Backup failed" warning and when I look, sure enough the drives are no longer communicating with my system.
 
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This product was a little confusing to initially use with paper labels stuck on the dock instead of being imprinted as part of the dock. And then part of the sticker says not applicable to this device kind of message. It has a 1, 2, and 3 and three is not even applicable--something about "JBOD" and "BIG" (which for us untechnical people has not meaning and they had no explanation with the dock as to what that means--thanks Charlie Howard from North Carolina -- below review -- for explaining what those mean). It was confusing to sort out, but once I understood the meaning of the stickers and the 1, 2 and 3 and how to use, it is easy to use and seems to be working just fine. It is a cheap sort of plastic, but it does the job. If the rebate comes as promised, it will have been a great value. I would buy again if all goes well with the rebate.
 
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I bought this so I can consolidate data I have across various drives. You know the drill - someone runs a bare drive on sale & you either have to install it into a desktop or put it into an HDD enclosure (screws, cables, cover). This allows you to bypass those steps and just slide the bare drive vertically down into the cradle. It's a cool design, but it's executed in basic Chinese plastic (it does the job, but it's a pretty simple, basic design with little to no heft to it). It comes with a USB cable and power adapter. I paid about twenty bucks after rebate and figure it's worth up to ten more based on the time it saves you. It's easy to use and XP recognized it right away. I'd buy it again.
 
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I needed a way to transfer information from an old SATA laptop drive onto the new one. This was quick and easy.
 
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While the product does work in JBOD mode, which works for what I need, I was not able to get spanning to work. Also, this causes the hard drive I am using to run significantly hotter than if I plug the hard drive directly into the computer. I will check voltages to see if I can find the source of this.
 
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This device works great. Plugged in a WD750g Caviar Green turned it on and it was ready for use. This drive is cool to touch after 5 hours of constant file copying. Now if only they had a model with both SATA and IDE slots, I would buy a second one.
 
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The dock was easy to connect, recognized by XP right away and worked as expected. Just formatted two 1TB drives, no problem so far, yet to try join HDs and see its long term performance. Drives got very hot while formatting though I wouldn't blame it on this device.
 
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I read a few alarmist reviews about this dock, but if it is used as a storage extender it does the job. I like the idea of hot-swapping and consolidation of disks. The only thing to remember is that disk should be initialized before using with this dock. I did not have and had to sweat to do it. After that, it works as advertised. Too bad that all potential SATA speed is limited with USB2 throughput.
 
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Works exactly as advertised. I'm not sure what the folks with problems are doing, but if you have XP and are connected to the internet, you don't even need the driver disc. If you need to access some SATA drives you have around, grab one.
 
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The dock is very stable, no risk of tipping over, and fairly slip-resistant. To use, just connect the power adapter and a USB cable (both supplied), then push one or two SATA drives down into the socket(s). Press the power button and Windows will recognize the drive(s). If they've never been formatted, you'll have to format them, but most drives ship pre-formatted these days. If you've used the drives before, they'll just be recognized, data and all. The drives stand vertically, and since they're exposed to the air (not within an enclosure), they don't overheat. I'm using two Western Digital drives and although they're slightly warm to the touch, they are not hot. By contrast, I used to have three of these WD drives, but they were in supposedly cool-running aluminum enclosures. They got so hot that one of them failed and had to be discarded. There are jumpers on the back, pre-set for "JBOD" (Just a Bunch of Disks). With this setting, you can use one or two drives; they can have different capacities; and they're completely independent: Windows assigns each one a separate drive letter. The other jumper setting is "BIG", which concatenates two drives into one larger drive. This is not RAID in any sense, and the BIG drive will have to be formatted, losing whatever may have been on the two physical drives. Once formatted this way, you can't use them separately unless you format them again. Since this is a USB 2.0 interface, "Hotswap" works perfectly. I did power the dock down before inserting/removing the drives, and Windows recognized what had happened and reconfigured accordingly. Almost like using a memory card, only bigger. It's too bad the dock doesn't also have an eSATA interface, because the effective transfer rate would be about 50% faster (an eSATA backup on another drive took 5:30; with USB 2.0, it took 8:10). That's why I rated "performance" a "4" instead of "5". "value" got a "5" because it was on sale. At full list price, I wouldn't have bought it.
 
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It took three tries to get a working product to me, but when I finally got it (more than 6 weeks after my initial order), it worked fine. I recommend it for large storage drives.
 
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Excellent, plug in the SATA hardrives and it booted up.
 
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I didn't get this thing to join dics together but it works great to access individual drives as well (jbod mode). The main reason I got this was so I could get stuff off of various hd's I have laying around without having to open a computer and connect the drive internally. It works great for hot plugging the drives.
 
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It was easy to install and play with.
 
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Had a few hd's needing information migrated to one main drive, this device made that a breeze. Great item.
 
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I like the concept of having a 'dock' for lumping or access drive with no cover or any screw assembly so I bought one. Well, this dock is good for quick use/access. The drive(s) become so hot within short period of time that your finger get burn if you touch the drive after disconnect from PC. I have Windows XP, when I connect the dock and set setting to JBOD, the explorer did say 2 drives but bottom low corner lump 2 drives on one hardware; therefore, if you want to swap another drive to it, you have to completely disconnect dock from PC. The 'dock' concept is there but need more improvement with drive(s) heat control.
 
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Love this thing am ordering one for my friend
 
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This product is great. I can use this to clone/backup my data or a whole drive. Just plug in start backup or clone and pull out when you finish.
 
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