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.

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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.

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

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

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