Sata hard drive docking station is one of those gadgets that may come handy if you have your old internal HDD disk or you want to use the new internal SSD (or HDD) disk as the external one. Orico has a solution that may help you do that. Find out more in a the full review.

UNBOXING

The docking station comes in a simple yet neat looking box and the contents include the docking station itself, a power cord, USB cable and instruction manuals.

DESIGN

ORICO docking station is made of high quality matt plastic material, which does not fell cheap by any means.

The top is where you need to insert your SATA HDD or SSD disk. You can either insert a 2.5″ or 3.5″ disks, which is very convenient if you have lots of old disks lying around. What you have to do is simply slide the HDD drive into the mount and you are good to go. It is very easy to do it and even easier to remove the disk.

On the back we have USB 3.0 interface, DC power input and a power on/off switch.

Once you power up the docking station, the notification LED turns purple.

Once you insert the disk, the LED light turns blue meaning that the disk has been inserted correctly and it has been recognised.

On the bottom of the docking station there are soft pads to prevent the device from sliding on the table.

FEATURES and FUNCTIONALITY

To start using the Orico docking station you have to connect it via USB 3.0 to your computer and power it up.

To be honest, this is a very old (made in 2009) HDD disk that I used in this review. It was lying around for quite a while and it was used in my old laptop, and I thought it was almost dead. The reason for this kind of thinking is that I replaced it with the SSD disk on my old laptop since it was working very slowly. Seriously, painfully slowly.

Once I connected the disk (320GB, SATA 3.0GB/s) to my MacBook I was pleasantly surprised that it was recognised within seconds. No drivers needed.

Another surprise was that the old HDD disk was a lot faster than using it inside the old laptop. As a matter of fact, it has become more than usable and I may start using it for backup files. All the folders and files are opening and closing fast, and the performance is great overall. Of course, it is not on par with any SSD disks but since I used this old HDD disk for 5 years on my old laptop, this is one the fastest performances of it I have seen.

CONCLUSIONS

Orico USB 3.0 SATA docking station is not something we haven’t seen before as there are plenty of other offerings out there but it offers a great quality and value.

For the price of $22.99, you are getting a well designed device that is sturdy, looks pretty nice but most importantly it performs as advertised.

It woke my old HDD disk to the second life and using it is absolutely seamless.

All in all, it is very easy to recommend the Orico SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to SATA hard drive docking station and it is well worth the price.

Buy SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station from Amazon US

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station from Newegg