ORICO Dual-Bay 2.5" 3.5" USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Duplicator and Clone Function
If you are the "tech guy" in the family, you have likely needed to repair a PC or two, maybe even three or more.
One thing you frequently need to do when repairing computers is to backup a drive, copy data, or just access a drive bare without the operating system running. Sure you can plug it into your computer, but there is a much easier way.
An external dock allows you to easily copy disks and move data from drives without having to tear open your case. Even better, this dock allows you to copy a drive without even being connected to a computer with a native internal copy function.
Moving to a SSD Drive
The Orico Dual-Bay supports SSD & full platter drives and is one good use case is to migrate a platter drive to an SSD disk all without having to use a computer.
When using the cloning functionality, there is an onboard progress meter that shows you how far it is in the process.
The dock supports USB 3.0, so you can get near maximum speed out of your drives, even SSD drives.
The dock is $36 on Amazon with free shipping.
All images are from Amazon product page
well done my dear friend, very nice article.
Haha was literally thinking about adding this to my cart yesterday, as I too am that "Family IT guy" lol. I suppose its especially useful when the cases of external drives break as well - something i find happens quite often.