Welland / SunBright SATA HDD Docking Enclosure (ME-601J)
Backups are very important – particularly if you use your computer for business / money-making purposes. Stop and think for a moment – if your computer’s hard drive experienced a catastrophic failure right now, could you get back on my feet in a short amount of time, or would business suffer detrimentally? For me, it was the latter answer – so I had to do something ASAP.
In the past, I’d used a number of hard drive caddy’s – but there was always a reason to make up an excuse for not doing a backup… the hard drive is too small, or the hard drive caddy has a power brick adaptor and it’s not very portable (so much for off-site backups when it’s a pain to take them off-site)… but that quickly changed when I purchased a Welland / SunBright SATA HDD Docking Enclosure.
Think of a hard drive caddy… but without a casing. Just grab an actual hard drive (the unit supports the docking of both 2.5″ laptop-style and regular 3.5″ hard drives) and click it into the dock so that it stands upright (on a slight angle). Do your backup, then pull the drive out and hide it somewhere or take it off-site. No screws, no wiring to untangle or move and no excuses. The ME-601J version of the Welland / SunBright SATA HDD Docking Enclosure connects via either USB 2 (generally around 320Mbps or 30MBs) or eSata (3,000Mbps or 300MBs; n.b.: if you’re confused about the difference between MBps and Mbps, please see this link) – so if you’re lucky enough to have eSata on your motherboard, you can really punch out those backups in no time at all.
The drive dock is supplied with a driver CD, power pack, eSata and USB cable.
Specifications from the manufacturer’s website are included below:
- Supports 2.5″/3.5″ SATA I/II HDD
- Hot-Swappable , Quick HDD Exchange
- Handy desktop docking in stylish looks
- USB2.0 up to 480Mbps , eSATA up to 3Gbps
- Friendly One-Touch-Backup button w/software
Rating
If it wasn’t for the provided one-touch backup software, I’d be giving this dock a 10 out of 10… but because the software didn’t work for me (on a 64-bit version of Windows 7), I’m giving this dock a 9 out of 10. As a general rule, I tend to dislike “over simplified” backup software and prefer to have control over what goes onto the drive to ensure it’s being copied properly… so I just use windows Explorer or Microsoft SyncToy to copy the data for me – so having no backup software is no issue for me. You may disagree, but a 9 out of 10 ain’t bad for this fantastically fast way to make easy backups that you can take off-site with little effort and no excuses!
Quick info…
Rating: 9/10
Website: www.welland.com.tw/html/docking/601j.html