Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wonder why there were so many reviews presented by folks without verified as actually purchased this product from Amazon. It could be that they did not check the box or more likely they purchased this product elsewhere and wanted to review it here. Before buying this, I bought the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station from Amazon since it is more well known and I wanted a HD dock with eSATA for better throughput. But I was also very interested in USB 3.0 and wanted a HD dock with USB 3.0 or better yet, both eSATA and USB 3.0. Thermaltake wanted too much for their duo interface dock. This Uspeed USB 3.0 and eSATA duo caught my attention. I wanted to find out whether one would want to use the USB 3.0 interface instead of the trusty eSATA so I used Disk Speed 2.0 from Roadkil.net to measure the throughput of both products. Here are the results. Uspeed Superspeed USB 3.0 and eSATA ==================================== eSATA Read Speed 110.00 MB/sec Cache Speed 153.60 MB/sec Access Time 14.82 ms USB 3.0 Read Speed 111.37 MB/sec Cache Speed 168.91 MB/sec Access Time 15.28 ms Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station ============================================ eSATA Read Speed 116.07 MB/sec Cache Speed 241.55 MB/sec Access Time 15.43 ms USB 2.0 Read Speed 32.73 MB/sec Cache Speed 50.45 MB/sec Access Time 15.31 ms The test drive a Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 (ST31500341AS) drive. The machine is an Intel Core i7 870 (no OC) system with 16GB RAM running the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with pagefiles and hibernation turned off. As you can see from the test results, the eSATA and USB 3.0 results are very close. It also shows how pathetic the USB 2.0 interface really is. That alone makes this product very appealing. I will be publishing another review for the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station based on the same test data. Update: After finishing the review for the Thermaltake unit, I wanted to find out the sustain speed difference between eSATA and USB 3.0, I tested the read and write speed for a 5.6GB (5,598,898,176 bytes) video file for both devices. The file was copied from an internally mounted Seagate 1.5TB drive to the dock mounted 1.5TB drive and then back. Read is defined as the copy operation from external to internal. Write is defined as the copy operation from internal to external. MB is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station =========================================== eSATA Read : 0:58 (96.5MB/s) Write: 1:36 (58.3MB/s) USB 2.0 Read : 2:46 (33.7MB/s) Write: 2:29 (37.6MB/s) Uspeed Superspeed USB 3.0 and eSATA ==================================== eSATA Read : 0:59 (94.9MB/s) Write: 1:29 (62.9.4MB/s) USB 3.0 Read : 0:59 (94.9MB/s) Write: 1:36 (58.3MB/s) Here the USB 2.0 interface does not looked as bad as compared to the disk speed tool report. Update on 4/13/2013 ============== I just discovered that this docking station is not compatible with my Rosewill 4 port powered USB 3.0 hub. When connected this way, the Windows 7 sees the 1.5 TB SATA hard drive as unformatted. Connecting the docking station directly to the USB 3.0 port on the motherboard worked perfectly. My 3TB Seagate USB 3.0 external hard drive has the same issue with that USB 3.0 hub. It looks like this problem is not uncommon so be careful when connecting this docking station through a USB 3.0 hub. If it does not work, connect it directly to the USB 3.0 port itself.