Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The picture looks exactly like another product that's more expensive. So I bought this instead to save a few bucks (and I can't use the eSATA interface the other product offers on my home computer). The drive spun up, the lights came on, and nobody was home, with my brand new Seagate drive not being recognizable to my Windows 7 system. In Customer Support, the lights are on and nobody is home at Diablotek, as well. The documentation is almost nonexistent, providing little beyond how to plug it in. So I decided to return it to Amazon.
But, with a little curiosity and one single brain cell still connected to an ancient Windows experience from a decade ago, I told Disk Management in Windows 7 that yes, I really do want to use this disk drive that we all agree is right there, and from that point things magically started working.
Here's the steps I needed to make this work in Windows 7 (conceptually identical in this regard to other MS Operating systems of the last 10 years): Start Menu, right click on Computer, left click on Manage, right click on the drive that my computer could find but didn't want to use yet (get this right, and don't pick the wrong one, OK?). Then I could either activate the partition or format the drive. This is not exactly user friendly.
So how, you ask, can I recommend this product. The answer is that it is an extremely inexpensive solution to a very large problem: How do I maintain large, off-site, low cost disk backups in a format that can be mounted on any computer, anytime? This is a perfect solution, in that it results in a standard SATA drive at less than $75/TB which I could keep in a desk drawer at work, and which, if installed in any other windows PC, instantly would provide access to my data.
The USB interface is slow, taking almost 20 hours to copy 500GB. But after the initial copy, the backup software I use (Folderclone) takes less than 10 minutes to figure out which of my millions of files and Email messages need to be copied or deleted in order to have an exact replica (some are pictures I took yesterday, some date back to when we booted computers by rubbing floppy disks with magnets). A daily backup typically takes less than 30 minutes.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Diablotek EN3525D Hard Drive Dock - 2.5"/3.5" SATA I/II to USB 2.0
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