Where would we be without tools. Well nowhere really. Ever since the pre-historic ages people relied on tool and its the tools which led them in to the future. With help of various tools we slowly progressed in to the current modern man. With time everything changes and well so are our tools. I am a IT Systems Engineer and as you can imagine I have an extensive collection of tool starting with cloning software all the way to hard drive readers. With recent technological inventions the market of hard drive duplication has been expanding drastically over the years. Today we have a privilege of taking a look at newest SSD/HDD Docking Station with Cloning features. A big thanks goes to ineo Tech for providing us with this product. Let's take a closer look at ineo's SSD/HDD Docking Station.

About the Product

Following information is taken from the ineo's website.

I-NA321U PLUSseries is an intelligent solution for your bare drives. It supports both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA Hard Disk Drives. I-NA321U PLUSseries makes it convenient to install your HDDs and it supports Super Speed USB 3.0 for your extreme Data transfer and backup. It makes file exchange even easier than you can imagine, you can just move data between your bare drives with I-NA321U PLUSseries.

Features

* Dual Bay USB3.0 Docking
* Aluminum Alloy Casing provides excellent cooling
* Blue and Red LED illuminated Panel indicates power and hard disk drive access activity
* USB3.0 Transfer rate up to amazing 5Gbps
* Support Clone Function
* Fully compatible with 2.5” & 3.5" SATA I/II Hard Disk Drives
* Truly Plug and Play
* High performance data movement

Specifications

* Interface : USB 3.0 to 2.5” or 3.5” SATA HDD Docking Station with Clone
* Supports : 2.5” or 3.5” SATA I/II Drives
* Data Transfer Rate : 5Gb/s
* Support Plug & Play : Yes
* Material : Aluminum Alloy
* USB Cable : USB 3.0 Cable
* Operating Temperature : 0o C to 50o C
* Operating Humidity : 5% to 95% non-condensing
* Power : Adapter 12V
* System Requirements : Windows 2000/Mac9.1/Linux for USB 2.0
* System Requirements : Windows XP/Vista/7 for USB 3.0
* Instruct Light : Blue & Red LED
* Support Hard Drive Capacity : SATAI/II UP TO 3TB
* Dimensions (mm) : 136x111x54.5 (mm)
* Warranty : Standard one-year factory warranty

OS Supported (for Client PC)
* Windows 2000/Mac9.1/Linux for USB2.0
* Windows XP/Vista/7 for USB 3.0

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at I-NA321U+.

Closer look

Front Shot		Rear Shot

What makes I-NA321U+ special is the PC less Cloning abilities. I can't tell you how many times I had to clone hard drives in my career and every time I had the task it was a pain to create image of a hard drive and then restore it. I-NA321U+ has ability to just clone the drives with data by pressing a button.This is what ineo is promising us and well to tell you the truth I am very excited. I-NA321U+ comes in a very colorful packaging. In fact all ineo's packaging is very vivid and uses light blue, white and black color scheme to outline some of the signature features.

ineo Logo		USB 3.0 connection

There aren't many logos on the packaging here however there is no way to miss that giant ineo logo on the side of the box. What's cool about the box is that ineo has included a speed to connection comparison chart to show a non technical users what are the differences in the connection. I-NA321U+ Come with USB 3.0 connection and well as you can see from the chart not only fastest available but also backward compatible to USB 2.0.

Out of the box		SATA Connections

There isn't much that comes with I-NA321U+ Inside of the box we found a power supply, USB 3.0 cable, I-NA321U+ itself and of course User Manual. I do strongly advise to take a look at the User Manual as there are some helpful tips provided for best performance. You can use any type of hard drives with I-NA321U+ as it covers all of the SATA series hard drives and SSD drives.

Top Shot		Bottom Shot

Dual bay design makes this particular unit is very valuable as you can mix and match pretty much any hard drive. To designate which drive to clone, bays are marked as "Target" and "Source" so there should be no confusion on what drive is being cloned. The whole unit sits on slide free surface. I do have to say, if you planning to keep this unit on your desk it is best to keep it on flat surface.

Rear Connections		Front buttons

The back of the unit is very simple and there are no surprises. Here we found power button, power supply connector and a USB 3.0 connector. The front of the I-NA321U+ has Reset and Copy buttons. By using these buttons you can reset the unit or initialize the cloning. What's cool here is the progress bar LED's. I-NA321U+ has 4 status LED's which show you the exact progress while cloning. And as ineo promises PC-less cloning all you have to do is press Copy button and hold it for 4 seconds and the cloning process initializes. Simple huh?

I-NA321U+

There is literally no set up time or configurations. As long as you know how to use this unit, you are up and running in no time.

Testing

The testing of I-NA321U+ has been conducted with two benchmarks. First benchmark we looked at was HD Tune Pro. This benchmark was conducted to show transfer speeds via USB 3.0.

HD Tune Pro Read		HD Tune Pro Write

We have used OCZ Agility 3 60GB hard drive to perform the benchmark and the results were very much what we expected. In the Read mode we got an average read speed of 136 MB/s with burst rate of 182 MB/s. In the Write mod the numbers were a little bit off. We have gotten an average write speed of 125 MB/s with burst rate of 178 MB/s. Comparing these matrices to some of the USB 2.0 connections it is clear to see that the USB 3.0 is about 5 times faster.

Cloning times

The second benchmark actually took a while to perform. We tried to compare SSD to SSD cloning and also HDD to HDD cloning and the results were very much satisfying with SSD's however not so much with mechanical drives. We started with small capacity drives such as OCZ Agility 3 60GB. The cloning took only 8 minutes. That was impressive. Little bigger drives took longer however not too too long. Kingston HyperX 3K 240Gb took nearly 30 minutes and V200 128 Gb took just under 20 minutes to complete. Mechanical Hard Drives had some difficulty with times. The Hybrid hard drive Seagate Momentus XT took 135 minutes to clone and Seagate Barracuda 3TB a whopping 229 minutes.

Regardless the times of completion we had absolutely 0 problems with the cloned drives. Plus if you are in IT bushiness, few hours to successfully clone a hard drive is considered a job well done! Hahaha.

Conclusion

I love it! I-NA321U+ has everything I need to get my job done faster and efficient. As we have looked at I-NA321U+ in our labs the unit is very solid with virtually no room for marginal error. Out of the box I-NA321U+ works just as described. One thing you got to keep in mind if that you are cloning partitions here. So if your partition on the source drive is bigger than the target drive, the clone will not be successful. That kind of makes sense doesn't it? Smaller source partitions clone without issues on to the new drives leaving an unallocated space on the target drives which you can expand at later use. In short, I-NA321U+ has to be the ultimate cloning docking station. PC-less operation really give operators that ease of use and convenience. Highly recommended hardware for IT use. We would like to award ineo's I-NA321U+ a 10/10! As we feel this is an award winning product!

Some pros we found:

Ease of use.

Dual bay for 2.5" and 3.5" drives.

Support of SATA 1 and 2 generations.

USB 3.0 support.

Fast cloning between SSD's.

Some cons we found:

None that we could find.