StarTech UNIDOCK3U Hard Drive Dock Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

As we mentioned in the opening, having a dock to quickly hot plug a drive in and get to work is a very useful tool – especially those of us who tinker a lot. A lot of people probably have older IDE based hard drives or even laying around or are upgrading to a new computer and want a way to move data off of an older drive and possibly perform something like a secure erase before selling or donating the old PC. In addition, laptop users may want an easy way to connect an extra hard drive for backing up data. Either way, StarTech.com offers an easy to use solution for doing all of the above.

While StarTech.com lists the dock for $89, it can currently be found online for about $64 which is what we would consider a price point that’s more suitable compared to similar devices. Really, those that don’t need the IDE solution can find more affordable solutions. For the $64 you get the dock with all necessary accessories to connect a SATA or IDE based drive to your PC through a USB 3.0 port. This can be a 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive so it’s very flexible in that respect and allows for virtual hot-swapping of drives. One drive of each interface can be connected simultaneously as there are dual bays on the top.

Performance is a little slower than we expected but not terrible with each interface being bridged by a JMicron branded chip. Flexibility is really the strong point of the dock although the addition of an eSATA port would kick it up a notch and improve the transfer speeds. StarTech.com covers the dock with a 2-year warranty and state an insertion rating of 15,000 cycles. Overall, it’s a very handy device to have on hand and works as advertised with very little user technical expertise required to set up and use.

Legit Bottom Line: If you have the occasional need to connect to an IDE or SATA based hard drive and don’t want the hassle of opening the case to make the connection, StarTech.com has a nice solution with their USB 3.0 to SATA/IDE HDD Dock.