This is a company that we ran into during NAB 2022. A company that had a series of HDD solutions on display. One of which, was the CineRAID Home Series USB 3.0 HDD Dock. A dock solution for a single HDD (3.5″ or 2.5″ models) or 2.5″ SATA SSD that allows you to easily adapt any of these drives to your computer without having to restart.
You simply plug in a 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive into the top slot, plug the drive into your computer/laptop via the provided USB 3.0 cable, and power it on. Your computer (or technically anything that supports external USB drives) should see it as a new external drive plugged into the system. Now you can view and copy information to and from it like any other external drive, as well as format, partition, or restore an image to it from your favorite backup software.
It’s a very simple and entry-level device. Since it only offers a single slot on the top, there is no direct disk to disk copying or anything. This means if you want to clone a drive to a new one, you have to first start with the source drive and save an image of it to your computer. Then swap out the source with the new drive (destination) and restore the saved image to it that one. This would require a software option of your liking.
However, if all you need is a solution to access various drives with and copy information back and forth, this offers everything you need and even includes the USB 3.0 cable.
It offers a simple build with an all-plastic design. No fancy aluminum enclosure or anything. No fans or anything else to point out. It’s just a simple dock solution.
This also means you won’t want to have your drives plugged in for long periods of time without having a fan of some sort blowing on the unit. These drives can get pretty hot and without some kind of air flow, there is always the chance of affecting the drive’s lifespan overall. This is common for most drive docks as very few come with a fan built-in for some reason.
As mentioned, it does come with a USB 3.0 cable. It also includes the wall adapter and some simple instructions. It doesn’t take much to use a dock like this so you may not even bother with the instructions unless you have never used one of these before. In which case, it wouldn’t hurt to give them a brief read-through.
The drive can be found on Amazon, although the white one seems to be unavailable at the moment so all you’ll be able to find is the black version (link/button below). You can also find it via CineRAID’s website. However, the company does charge a bit more than what you’ll find it for on Amazon (currently $21.99 on Amazon vs $39.99 on the company website).
Our Conclusion
It’s a simple entry-level solution that gets the job done where it needs to. However, we would advise sticking to Amazon if you buy one as the price on the company’s website would be too much in our opinion. It comes too close to the price of an entry-level dual-drive dock with built-in clone functions. However, with the price it is going for at Amazon (at least, at the time of writing this), it is well worth it.
Additional Images:
Specifications:
- Single Drive
- USB 3.0 up to 5Gbps (Backwards compatible to USB 1.0 & 2.0)
- Designed for 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA I, II or III HDD or SSD drives
- Supports up to 12TB+ capacity drives
- Compatibility: Sony PS4, Windows, Mac and Linux OS (Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 and Mac OS 10.4+)
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
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