Cavalry Storage EN-CAHDD Series USB Dual-Bay 3.5-Inch and 2.5-Inch 2-Bay SATA Hard Drive External Dock EN-CAHDD2B-ZB- Drives Not Included
- Hot-swappable bays with open design for easy access and excellent heat dissipation
- Use the two-bay like a tape drive – remove full hard drives easily and replace with any SATA drive (2.5-inch or 3.5-inch)
- Configurable to JBOD and BIG (Spanning)
- Unit Includes – One (1) year manufacturer’s warranty, dual bay hard drive dock for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives in any combination
- System Requirements – Available USB port, Mac OS 9.x or newer, Windows 98SE / Me / 2000 / XP / Vista
Product Description
The ¿Cavalry Dock¿ is perhaps the easiest and most cost-effective way to consolidate the storage of any two hard drives. This two-bay, hot-swappable USB 2.0 dock is perfect for lumping together your odd-capacity drives into one Spanning device¿just insert any two 2.5-inch or 3.5¿ SATA drives. Your new volume will be read as one drive with combined capacity when set to Spanning (BIG). And the BIG/JBOD settings are easy to change as well¿just use the switch on the back of the dock. Your extra hard drives can finally be put to good use with this versatile dock. And with no clumsy cover to unscrew or disassemble, your hot-swappable drives are always accessible and well-ventilated, without a noisy fan. With the USB 2.0 interface and stable, compact base, the ¿Cavalry Dock¿ is perfect for your home or office desktop computer…. More >>
Cavalry Storage EN-CAHDD Series USB Dual-Bay 3.5-Inch and 2.5-Inch 2-Bay SATA Hard Drive External Dock EN-CAHDD2B-ZB- Drives Not Included
Tagged with: 2.5inch • 2bay • 3.5Inch • Bays • Cavalry • Combination System • Compact Base • Computer Storage • Desktop Computer • Dock • Drive • Drives • DualBay • Easy Access • ENCAHDD • ENCAHDD2BZB • External • Hard • Hard Drive • Hard Drives • Included • Jbod • Mac Os 9 • Noisy Fan • Office Desktop • Product Description • SATA • Series • Storage • Swappable Drives • System Requirements • Tape Drive • Usb 2 0 • Warranty • Zb
I’ve only used it a couple of times with 2.5″ drive, using it as bridge between my old laptop drive (mounted by way of this dock) and the new one installed in my computer. Recognized instantly and then put through a clone without incident. Should probably give it 5 stars since it looks well made but the limited use I’ve put it through, and the complete absence of any idea how it does with 3.5″ drives, makes me stop at 4 stars.
The dock works fine, i have 2 sata HDD one is WD 250gb and a SG 320gb, the WD have been working since day 1 but the SG doesn’t even make a sound, NADA. soo i dont know if the HDD is broken(it was fine before and nope i cant put it on the previous pc for is not available anymore)or the dock is somehow needed to be configured with the lil swicht in the back, i’m not expert but those thingys should come standard.
This drive dock is listed as a “USB 2-Bay 3.5-Inch and 2.5-Inch 2-Bay External SATA”
If you are looking for a dock with an eSATA connection; you will not find it here. Don’t fall for the deceptive wording: “External SATA”.
This dock WILL NOT GIVE YOU eSATA SPEED. It is NOT eSATA… It is just Hard Drive SATA, with a single USB connector on the outside.
UPDATE:
For those unhappy with my review: Since I wrote this review, the description was changed to remove the deceptive wording “External SATA”. It is now simply a “SATA Hard Drive External Dock”.
Oddly, this change in description seemed to happen around the same time that 3 people marked my review as not-helpfull …
I have this product and it works great as a USB attached Drive Dock. But still not recomended for high resolution video editing projects.
Everytime a hard drive spins (any drive any brand), it makes a clicking noise. I cannot put this on a table, shelf or anything with a hollow bottom. I have to put this on the floor to use it silently.
This is a nearly ideal form of external storage for do-it-yourself people. Connect a USB cable between the dock and the computer, plug the dock into power, drop in a bare SATA drive (or two of them), and turn it on. Windows recognizes the drive(s) and they’re immediately ready for use, just as though they were internal or in an enclosure.
The drives are hot-swappable, so you can “safely remove hardware” when they’re not in use, and drop in another one whenver you wish to do so.
Since the drives are free-standing on your desk, they don’t need fans to keep them within safe temperature limits. Drives do run very warm, but that’s the nature of hard drives, and has nothing to do with the dock.
Noise level depends on the drive(s) you are using: I have a bunch of old Western Digital drives, and they’re pretty quiet.
Although I’ve read other people’s postings that reported a variety of problems, the dock has worked flawlessly for me. There are some DIP switches on the back, with a prominent bright yellow sticker that warns you to not have switches 1 and 2 set to “on” at the same time: switch “1″ allows spanning (if you use two HD’s, they’ll look like one larger HD to Windows, and you will not be able to use them separately later one without re-formatting); switch “2″ keeps them separate (if you use two HD’s, they’ll show up as two normal drives in Windows).
The four-star rating reflects my wish for an eSATA interface on the dock. I knew it was USB-only when ordering it, so this is not a complaint. But, if I were ordering something now, I’d get one of the docks that support eSATA. Amazon sells a few of them for even less than this dock (but those lower-priced eSATA docks only hold one hard drive at a time).
PERFORMANCE (USB vs. eSATA):
1) ShadowProtect Backup on a dual-core computer with a SATA-I RAID-0 interface: a 55GB backup to this dock took 60 minutes; the same backup to an eSATA enclosure took 35 minutes.
2) Norton Ghost Backup on a quad-core computer with a SATA-II (no RAID) interface: a 47GB backup to this dock took 100 minutes; backing up to an eSATA enclosure took 80 minutes.
3) Windows hot-swapping works more reliably with USB than with eSATA.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
1) for most purposes, the slower performance of USB, as compared with eSATA, will not make much of a difference, so this dock is will be a satisfactory choice.
2) if your system and applications can exploit the higher potential speed of eSATA, get one of the eSATA docks.
3) if the idea of handling a “bare drive” bothers you, do not get this. Cavalry makes some wonderful external enclosures that contain SATA hard drives and have both USB and eSATA interfaces. I use them for regular backups and they’ve been flawless (just more expensive).