...something like this at the office. I am a Desktop support tech and I image computer on a daily basis. This can save me lots and lots of time. Thanks for letting me know about this.
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Brought to our attention by legendary National Geographic photographer David Alan Harvey and his two National Geographic filmmaker sons, Bryan and Erin, who have been wearing G-Shock watches for years. Shock-resistant and ultra-accurate, the watch receive
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18-volt cordless rotary laser kit with built-in wall, floor, and tripod mounts Accurate to 1/4-inch at 100 feet; built-in bump sensor; accepts all DEWALT 9.6 to 18-volt batteries Dual side-by-side laser diodes; side impact, rubber-mounted roll cage for du
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| StarTech USB to SATA Hard Drive Duplicator |
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| Written by Vikram Chand | ||||||
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Wednesday, 14 October 2009 |
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Rated  4.5 out of 5 Stars |
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Page 2 of 4
THE TEST
I used a Hitachi HTS541010G9SA00 5400RPM 100 GB SATA hard drive as the source with 25 GB of data on the drive (NTFS file system). I used a Hitachi HTS542512K9SA00 5400RPM 120 GB SATA drive as the destination (note I did not pre-format or erase data from the destination drive). I just picked a destination drive from my stock pile (didn't really care about what happened to the data on it). By the way these are both 2.5" drives for laptop computers. I inserted both hard drives in the appropriate slots (source and destination), pressed in the Mode (Dup/PC) button to put it in Duplicate mode and powered up the hard drive duplicator. It takes a few seconds to power up and recognize both drives (the indicator lights next to the slots will turn Blue). If the indicator lights turn red then you know that the drive is either bad or cannot be recognized. Then I pressed the Start button to begin the duplication process (you will hear a beep that indicates the process has started and the progress bar will start flashing). This particular duplication took approximately 50 minutes to complete from start to finish (you will hear 3 beeps when the duplication finishes). This is by far way faster than taking a ghost image of the source (using Symantec Ghost) then swapping the drives and pushing that same image to the new/destination drive. Taking a ghost image of a 100 GB drive usually takes 45 minutes for us when storing the image on a shared network drive. Then you also have to account for the time that it takes to actually swap the drives physically. Then comes restoring the images to the new drive takes another 45 minutes or so. So over all I duplicated a drive that would have taken me hour and a half to two hours in 50 minutes. It is also faster than copying files manually or using any kind of software while having the destination drive as a slave internally or connected using a USB adapter externally. Slaving a drive internally also requires you to open the case and install the drive. Then once you are done copying, you still have to remove or swap them out. So using a hard drive duplicator can really save you a bunch of time. Now I also want the data integrity to still be the same as the source so to test that I booted to windows on the new drive without any issues what so ever. So the whole process was a success and I saved some time while doing it. This gives me more time to do other things like testing products and writing reviews. You can also use the supplied USB cable to connect this hard drive duplicator to your computer to access both drives as actual drives on your computer (the drives will be detected by your computer automatically so you don't have to worry about any driver issues). You will be able to browse both drives just you do with your local C: drive. I used HD Tach to test the data transfer rate using the USB cable and it averages out to 16.3 MB/s. This is decent but not sufficient for coping large amount of data.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 January 2010 |