Introduction

Earlier this month we looked at StarTech.com’s Dual SATA Enclosure and found it to be a very high quality product indeed, operating at a premium price range but offering quite a few features for the money as well. Today we’ll be looking at another item that has a slightly different purpose, but could be described in much the same way.

It’s a 4 bay standalone HDD duplicator, designed to allow the contents of a single drive to be copied to three other drives simultaneously. It doesn’t need to be connected to a PC to operate as a duplicator, although it can serve as a massive 4 hard drive enclosure when connected to a PC via USB 3.0 or eSATA.

It’s an interesting idea, so let’s have a look at how it works and whether it’s worth that high price tag – £544.79!

Technical Specifications

• Drives: 4x SATA 2.5″ or 3.5″
• Max Drive Capacity: 4 TB 3.5″ per bay, 1 TB 2.5″ per bay
• Host Connectors: 1x eSATA, 1x USB 3.0
• Performance: USB 3.0 5 Gb/s, SATA II 3 Gb/s
• Fans: 2 x 60 mm
• Insertion Rating: 15,000 cycles per bay
• Chipset ID: Jmicron – JMB394 + GMS539
• Software Compatibility: Windows 2000 to 8 (x32 + x64), Mac OS X (to 10.8), Linux
• Dimensions: 170 x 285 x 94 mm
• Weight: 1.1 kg
• Warranty: 2 Years

Packaging

The packaging of the StarTech HD Duplicator is simple and pleasant, with black text and yellow highlights on a white box. The box has the name of the product in multiple European languages, a sentence describing it (“Exactly duplicate one SATA drive onto three others simultaneously”), a picture and a list of what’s inside the box.

Inside our box we found a number of cables: three clover leaf adapters for the US, UK and EU, a proprietary USB 3.0 cable and an eSATA cable.

There was also an adapter for converting an older IDE drive into SATA, so it could be used in the machine.

Finally, there was an advert for the IDE adapter and a short bit of documentation for the drive.

Now we can move on to the physical features of the drive.