StarTech.com USB 3.0 to IDE SATA Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5/3.5" Hard Drive - SuperSpeed Hard Drive Dock (UNIDOCK3U)

Purchased the StarTech USB 3.0 Docking Station from Amazon inorder to test hard drives and transfer info from one to another. Seems it expanded the things I can do with it. Here is a list of what its being used for now.1. Plug in a spare hard drive and do a PC backup using the StarTech as an external hard drive2. With the StarTech you can transfer data from an IDE to a SATA drive3. As an external drive, you can run diagnostics on a 3.5 or 2.5 Sata/IDE drive from your PC4. It Utilizes the speed of USB 3.0 for all back and forth data communicationsDon't know why I waited so long to purchase it! It has worked out perfectly for these tasks. Received the item quickly as always from Amazon. Highly recommend this product both as a tech accessory and external HD.

After looking through many different brands I settled on this one as it had both IDE and SATA capabilities, and unlike most/many docking stations, had mostly positive reviews. It worked perfectly right out of the box, was simple to use, and included all the necessary parts, plugs, and cables needed for it to work. The only possible detractors are the power cord and USB cable could be a foot or two longer, but those aren't enough to give it less than the five stars it deserves. I was up and running with less than 10 minutes. Essentially a perfect user experience.

I am an IT technician so I purchased this for my workbench. I don't often need to transfer data from IDE drives anymore, but I bought this to consolidate my IDE to USB cable and single SATA USB 2.0 dock to this thing which is USB 3.0 and has the best of both worlds. Or so I thought.The SATA function works just fine and I was able to pop in several SATA drives and transfer at blazing 3.0 speeds no problem. But when I tried 5 different IDE drives on 3 different computers, the dock did not recognize the drives or Windows kept seeing some drives as unformatted. My old, simple IDE to USB connector cable and separate power adapter worked flawlessly for all 5 drives, each of which had data on them and were certainly not unformatted. I wouldn't buy this product for the IDE function at all. Besides, with the fact that IDE is pretty much as obsolete as floppy drives are, you might as well just buy the SATA-only docks and get yourself a really cheap $10 IDE to USE cable solution, as I have, for the increasingly rare times you do need to transfer stuff off of IDE drives. I think I will be eBaying this thing pretty soon.

Mine worked fine with win 8 but NOT with win 8.1. Once I finished the upgrade and rebooted the error message keeps saying it does not recognize the "USB object' that was plugged in. The HDD is fine as I installed it inside the desktop and it works fine--but not in the dock. The purpose is to have something outside the computer for back up etc and this does not work in windows 8.1.

I will only caveat my review by saying I haven't had a chance to test out the IDE slot on this dock yet; I've been focused on the SATA slot so far. Once I've put the IDE slot through it's paces, I'll update this review.WHY I BOUGHT THIS INSTEAD OF AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE OR DRIVE + ENCLOSURE:I bought this dock based on experience and research regarding external drive cases and to put old IDE drives in it to extract their data. We've got a bit of a pile up from old towers here and it's really inconvenient to have to crack open a computer case and hook up the drive to do these extractions.I've had a number external hard drive enclosures, a couple of them made as externals (come with the drive built in) and two other setups with a bare hard drive. The two external enclosures in which you insert a drive, two different brands, bought two years apart, didn't last more than a year and one of them had a cooling fan. Both died by literally burning up, with smoke coming from wiring. Fortunately, there were some warning signs and the drives had been removed when the wiring burned up in both, so no data loss. Regarding the other externals, we've two die without warning, within a few months and just over a year, with total data loss in both cases.I decided to go with this dock for convenience of changing out drives, but also because most of my reading on the subject validates my concerns and experiences; the dock and drives used in them are more reliable. I think it has to do with heat and ventilation.SET UP, USE IS EASY (SATA)In addition to my plans to use for extractions from IDE drives, I bought a Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 7200 RPM bare drive to do some file shuffling, drive organization, and backups.http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009JXPS6U/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_sol_3On my iMac with Snow Leopard, it really was a "plug and play" situation. Plugging in a SATA is easy, my Mac recognized it as not properly formatted, which I of course expected, and in very little time I had it formatted and partitioned. I actually needed a partition which was a bootable install of Snow Leopard, which went very smoothly as well.I was able to move the drive to an ailing Mac and the boot up went smooth as silk and the drive operated the same way as on the original Mac on which it was formatted.The unit is easy to work with - just plug it in to the power, the computer, hit the appropriate drive button (1 or 2) and the drive is recognized. The power button for the drive in question lights up to let you know it's powered up and also flashes when your performing an active operation.As I say, all of this has been done so far with SATA and Macs. I'll report back regarding IDE and Windows.