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).

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.