Quick Review ORICO 2 5 3 5 USB3 0 External Hard Drive Dock

An engineer once told me that he never purchased out-of-the box portable hard drives. He preferred SSD and HDDs that had visible SATA bridges and without fancy casing. The gentleman stored these drives in a secure box free from static electricity and exposure to physical damage. Moreover, he told me that "naked" drives are easier to troubleshoot, especially if you own a hard drive dock.

Note: I was somewhat miffed at this because I recently purchased a 4 TB Toshiba Canvio portable hard drive.

Even if you dont troubleshoot hard drives often, its still handy to have an external USB hard drive dock, particularly if you work with servers, regularly replace internal hard drives, or youre just upgrading your old mechanical HDDs to SSDs. A USB 3.0 hard drive dock, such as the ORICO 2.5 & 3.5 inch SATA3.0 USB3.0 External Hard Drive Dock, is particularly useful if youre unloading gigabytes of data at a time. 

Having purchased an Acer ES 11 which included a 500 GB Western Digital mechanical hard drive, I used the Orico hard drive dock to move data between my SSD drive and mechanical drives, which would serve as a "naked" backup storage. Data transfer speeds were excellent with the Orico when connected to the USB 3.0 port on the ES 11. Running Debian 8 Jessie and Fedora 25 helped speed things along when syncing or transferring data, though using macOS or Windows should exhibit little to no different. The Orico also had no problems with a generic 128 GB SSD drive that came with my Zotac ZBOX Nano.

The Orico USB 3.0 hard drive dock connected to an Acer ES 11 running Fedora 25.

In general, if you regularly take out SSD or mechanical hard drives from your laptops or desktops, a hard drive dock is extremely useful. The Orico has a power button, which is a basic feature that is occasionally ignored in accessories sold today. Although some users prefer a vertical design for hard drive docks, where you insert the hard drive downwards to the SATA connector, my experience with Dell and consumer storage taught me there are reasons why manufacturers prefer that you have hard drives lying down horizontally when the platters are spinning (this isnt an issue if you use SSDs however). Thankfully, the Oricos dimensions fit the 3.5" drives perfectly, though the smaller 2.5" looks somewhat odd in the huge bedspace allotted.