Tips on Choosing Hard Drive Docking Station for HDD or SSD

For those who always need to use hard drives for data copy or transfer, the portable and hot swapping hard drive docking station or hard drive enclosure is very convenient computer peripheral. Hard drive dock station or enclosure makes an internal hard drive into an external one. This is very useful when we need to expand the space of our computer or when we need to access the hard drive of a laptop from an desktop.

Making the internal hard drive external just brings us more flexibility. We just choose the enclosure or dock station and it makes traditional hard drive portable. We can easily transfer data to the hard drive on most of the operation systems. Such external hard drive just reduce the possibility of data corruption or data loss. Data can be backed up or archived much more easily. Besides, we can even recover data from a damaged computer via the hard drive dock station.

Since hard drive enclosure has an close-type design, with the hard drive enclosed in the case. Though portable, it is not easy for changing the hard drives inside. Compared to hard drive enclosure, hard drive dock station seems much more convenient when we need to transfer data between two different HDDs and it can realize quick swapping HDD without the need for external drive enclosure. Then how to choose the hard drive docking station?

Pay attention to the material of the dock station. Hard drive dock station is mainly made from plastics. For better durability, some of the docks are made from steel. Besides, the size of hard drive dock stations differ. Usually, they come with sizes of 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch, supporting the hard drives of 2.5’ and 3.5’ respectively. Take a look at the interface of the different hard drive dock stations. Now HDDs use SATA or IDE interfaces, so the docking station should be chosen accordingly. Some HDD docking stations have extra functions, such as a USB hub or multi-card reader. Choose it according to our need. The cable connecting the dock station to our computer also affects the transfer speed, with USB 3.0 transferring data faster. Now there are hard drive dock stations with different numbers of bays. Single hard drive dock station can only support one hard drive yet dual bay dock take two internal hard drives. Dual bay dock station can offer us larger portable hard drive space.

Hard drive dock station protects our hard drive as well transforms internal hard drives into a plug-and-play device. We can use it anytime while system is running and it will become a removable storage drive.