Velocity Micro Vmultra Drive External Peripheral (Vmultradrive 102)

I took lot of time in deciding on a all in one product as i wanted to be absolutely sure. so i compared apricorn aegis netdock and the velocity micro vmultra drive. There were many feedbacks for aegis netdock but none for vmultra which made it difficult for me to decide.But one of the feedbacks of the usb ports being too close to each other on the netdock made me do further research and closely observe large resolution pics of both the products. Only then made me seriously look at vmultra inspite of no customer feedbacks on Amazon. Also vmultra has usb 3.0 ports and SD/SDHC/MMC card slot which is not available on aegis netdock as it has 4 USB 2.0 ports. Its all updated technology you pay for as the USB 2 will be phased out soon from most products. Vmultra i bought came with 7200 rpm 500 GB hard drive while Aegis Netdock offers only 5400 RPM for all the storage capacities. So I have USB 3.0 and a 7200 RPM HDD which means faster performance than Aegis Netdock. Lastly removing the HDD on a vmultra and replacing with another HDD is so easy. Just pull two clips and the flap over the HDD comes off. In Aegis one needs to unscrew the case and then replace the HDD.Also I visited the websites of both the products. You will be surprised at the options of complete customization of all the components of VMultra which is not available on Aegis Netdock website. Aegis offers just the case or choice of different capacity hard disk whereas Vmultra offers choice of only the case or choice of SSD or HDD with different capacities. Also customizable is to have a blu ray drive or CD/DVD RW Combo drive.The product feels solid in built and has a matte finish unlike the aegis netdocks glossy finish which could have your fingerprints all over it.Finally I plugged it into my ultraportable HP laptop and it worked with no effort. The drivers got installed automatically and I tested every component and it works fine as promised in their product literature.Although a very slow decision I think I have taken the best decision. I had a choice of buying a separate external DVD drive, hard drive, USB hub and have the wires cluttered all over my desk but here its just one single wire if you are powering from the laptops USB port or two wires if you are connected to a plug point.Velocity is known for their high performance pc's and have won many awards but I think while they are good in their technical capability they sadly lack in their marketing which could be the reason I dont see any customer feedbacks or much of marketing material online.

I bought this as a way to combine external storage, a USB hub and an optical drive for IT work and those rare cases where I still need an optical drive.I replaced the HDD with an SSD and the DVD drive with a blu-ray drive. When connected to USB 3 I have never needed the additional power plug, the power from USB 3 is enough on its own.A word of caution on the optical drive upgrade, you need to use the taller 12.7mm standard, not the 9.5mm standard. I used this optical drive to upgrade mine:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06VYGWQG7I use this thing to backup coding projects, store OS ISOs, rip disks and install older games.If this thing came with a blu-ray drive and SSD out of the box I would it 5 stars instead of 4.

First 3 times I used this device, it worked great and I loved it.It never left my desk and I only plugged in the power supply when it was in use.The 4th time I used it was last Friday. I plugged it into my laptop just so I could load some large files onto it for shuttling to another computer. As soon as I plugged it in, the laptop turned off immediately. I figured I hit a button by accident, so while I waited for my laptop to reboot, I idiotically plugged the Vmultra drive into a desktop computer just so that I could get the files copied. Same thing happened to the desktop machine, turned off. At this point I noticed that my laptop was not rebooting. It is fried, won't even POST. The desktop machine is the same way. Laptop is off to the manufacturer to have the mobo replaced, desktop machine will probably need the same.I pulled the 500gb HDD out and put it into a different enclosure to see if it was still functioning, it is not. Also, the USB port on the vmultra drive has a distinct fried-electronics smell to it, so it seems like something shorted in a very bad way and it pumped a bunch of power through the USB cable, frying whatever it was plugged into.

The VMultra external device is handy because of its many features. It's a multi-card reader, multi-USB hub with its 1 x 2.0 and 2 x 3.0 slots, a high capacity hard drive, and a DVD R/W drive.