4 BAY HDD Docking Station

This has been by far the best dock I owned, while it was a little pricey, it was well worth it and works perfectly every time I use it and after unboxing it, I had everything ready to go and installed within 5 minutes, upon testing the device I found that the speeds are better than my previous 2 slot dock, the cloning is great and never had any issues with this dock, however I have only used the cloning a few times as the last dock I had wiped out a source and target partition table upon cloning so I am more on edge about using it to do direct clones, but the low priority drives I did do cloning on had zero issue so for the time being I love it. Overall I would recommend this over the competitors, it's a bit more expensive but well worth it.

I've only had it for 8 hours but it's working great so far. I've tried it with about a dozen hard drives transferring data solely between the drives in this enclosure. I've probably transferred and deleted about 15TB of data so far without any issues with any of the hard drives that I have used. My only knock and it would be the same for any enclosure with spinning disks is that the drives get pretty warm. Since it is an open air system, I just point a small fan at the drives and life is good. I've owned several 2 drive enclosures from Orico and they have all worked well for me. The oldest enclosure that this new one replaced was 4 years old. No issues other than it only holds 2 drives. The intended use of this unit is to keep 2 drives in constantly with the 2 other slots being used as needed. This particular model is an improvement over the the 2 slot one since the power switch is on the top right as opposed to the back of the 2 slot version. I also like the drive access lights that represent each of the drives inserted in the system.

I’ve used this unit with multiple drives, including a couple of 6TB SATA drives and a couple of 8TB SATA drives, and overall it has performed well. Connecting the drives and getting everything set up is very straightforward, making it easy to start using right away. I also tested the cloning feature. It works, but it took a little time to get started, which may require some patience during the initial setup. Once running, though, it functions as expected. One thing I noticed is that when installing a new drive, the existing drives may temporarily disappear for a few seconds while the system recognizes the new hardware. This isn’t a major issue, but it can be a bit surprising if you’re not expecting it. Another minor drawback is how the unit behaves after a power outage—you may need to manually press the power button to get it active again, rather than it automatically powering back on. On the positive side, the copying speeds are solid and consistent, which is important when working with larger drives like these. Overall, it’s a reliable and easy-to-use unit with good performance, though there are a few small quirks to be aware of.

The ORICO 4 Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station is the best thing since sliced bread. It permits USB 3.0 fast access to 4 physical devices from my PC. A small problem may happen when participating hard drives are partitioned. Window 10 can get confused during mounting and users get confused when using. A very well defined naming convention helps to reduce this confusion. The duplicator/cloning feature is a bonus. I have not tested the cloning feature. I have tested many magnetic disk (HDD) drives but only one SSD drive. The testing of the mounted SSD device was both surprising and disappointing. I found that the read/write performance characteristics were no better than an HDD device. Repeated testing and formatting changed nothing and I became concerned about the new SDD device. However, after the SDD disk was installed into the intended PC target, the performance characteristics were better than expected. Windows 10 reported more than double the values experienced in ORICO dock. I do not have another SDD to continue testing the ORICO Docking Station but my intention of use for this device may need to be altered. The advertised 5 Gbps Transfer Speeds may be physically divided into the 4 bays leaving little more than 1 Gbps per bay. I like what I have purchased and I think it has much value. I cannot explain the limitations demonstrated by the SDD disk.

For basic usage, I suppose these USB drive docks might be OK. For intensive use, like backing up a ZFS pool on TrueNAS, avoid these at all costs. I have the same problems with both units that I own. Pros: 1. They are great hard drive holders. Cons: 1. The USB cables that are included are unreliable garbage. Literally any random USB 3 type B cable you have stashed in a drawer would be better. 2. They don't pass through drive serial numbers correctly. TrueNAS will only recognize them in the ZFS CLI, but not the web interface as a result. (You will have to use partitions instead of the raw drives.) 3. They have have very little bandwidth and IO. Even sequential IO is poor unless you store data with a large block size like 1MB. Expect speeds of about 30 MB/s to maybe 80 MB/s per drive in real wold usage. I have compared performance against internal SATA ports and also a SAS controller. Something is not right with the design of this drive dock. I understand that USB 3 limits total bandwidth to about 400 MB/s (about 100 per drive), but you should see much better performance than 30 MB/s on sequential workloads!

As advertised

Tenía un par de años pensando en hacerme de mi "base duplicadora" hasta que pude comprarla de nuevo, no la he usado mucho pero se ve de gran calidad y durabilidad

good

I have several multi bay drive boxes, each with 5 drives in it. While they have served well over the years, the cost of living crisis means I am unable to run these bays as often as I would like and I find myself having to try to plan which box I will have on and when. This is not a good situation. As they are all, solid bays it is a pain to remove and mount drives when I need them. The solution of course, is something like this, where I can plug in the drives I want on any particular day, and get on with tasks without struggling. Plus, being able to have between one and four drives helps my hugely. I can carry out basic maintenance and move stuff around from active to storage media. Also, and this is the big thing for me, I can reduce to cost of using the drives. So instead of having two stations with 10 drives running, I can now have one station - with 1-4 drives running, and only the drives I actually want to use at the time. Swapping out drives is as simple as waiting for activity to stop, turning the dock off, switching out drives, and turning it back on again. A matter of seconds where before I could be looking at up to an hour to switch things around. Plus, the other drive bays I was using, don't like not to be full. This one doesn't care. I does not object if I just have one or two drives mounted and running. Another big plus for this unit is it is so quiet. No fans spinning, no grinding, no hammering. Just nice quiet drives ticking away doing their thing. Heat is an issue though, This unit has no cooling facility, so no fans drawing the heat away, it is entirely reliant on air cooling as the large part of the hard drives are exposed. I've found a small USB desk fan that is extremely quiet and have that running blowing air over the drive to keep their temperature within tolerances. The cost of running the bays before became prohibitive over the 2022-23 winter, as electricity prices spiralled ever upwards. I wish to heck I had bought this then, as it would have enabled me to continue working without having to worry about the smart metre celebrating another lottery win. This unit would have saved me time, money and effort and I feel kinda stupid for not thinking of it before. I have used Orico products for the lasts six years and have found them to be reliable, well made and no frills units. No wizzy buttons or doodads, just basic functional tools and essential parts. I have only had a problem with one unit a couple years ago, and I still don't know what was wrong with it, but it was replaced without argument. This reliability and concentration on function rather than toys is why I decided to buy this dock instead of another, and because it is Orico and I'm happy with the products I already own. My only regret is not buying this earlier. It is simple, functional, well made, clean and efficient. It works precisely how you would expect and without fuss. A nice touch is the ability to clone drives for archiving and storing. That was always a chore in the past. While cloning is not quick, it is reliable and I don't have to spend time attending to the unit to make sure it's working. This one just works. Data transfer between drives is fast, smooth and problem free. I have managed to clean and organise several large drives without any fuss at all. Admittedly having a bunch of loose drives around is a nuisance, but I have now bought a proper fire-proof storage box for them which should make mirror and back up drives safer and my desk tidier. For me, this was definitely the best buy this year. Money well spent on a nicely made, clean and "works as advertised" piece of kit I should have got a while back. Thank you Orico, great piece of kit that will save me some serious money.

It’s took forever to clone a 750GB HDD more than 5 hours, and it’s not function like what the user manual said. For mounting disks it’s not that fast as the advertised for transferring data. After all for this price you can get better options…

As others stated packaging came in makers box, no damage cause box was fit for purpose. Plugged in & working fine, can even edit in drive manager YES. Tx & Rx from 1 to another approx 40 to 50 mb/s. Worked with one of these from another maker, 1 drive bay (Has adaptor to fit older drive, which is handy), maxed out at 7 or 8 mb/s. These are handy to check HD's, I have loads of older drives & drives of lower capacity that I have replaced with larger drives, ( these are mostly SSD). Will update later once it has proved it's self. Had this many months, Nice, Tx rate is good, maybe maxing out my PC Tx rate, at times 80m/s, other times down to 14. This could be cause of the file type. Problems are possibly caused by win, sleeps & times it does not wake especially with 4 drives in action. Larger the common file type the better the Tx rate. I do not need or have the space for another. Recommended Yes, no setup needed. Now been in operation few years. With a good HD I can get 120 to 160 MB/s. Only change is in Win 11/12 update used to be able hot swop, now it resets the 4 drives. Do NOT run 2 of these on the same Computer, you will loose drives, I lost 4 drives.