Question 1

Can I use this to read data  on a hard drive instead of cloning?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely.  In fact, I used my personal Wavlink dock for that very purpose this morning — to view folders and files on four HDDs I pulled from two outdated PCs. Windows Explorer recognizes docked drives (HDD and SSD) just like thumb drives, DVDs, SD cards, or any other storage medium.  BTW, I bought another one of these for work to clone HDDs and to backup folders/files.  Don't let the reasonable price shy you away. I've not experienced any difficulties with either unit.

Question 2

Does this work with mixed seagate and western digital drives?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I had one of each in mine at the same time just last week to recover someone’s data. BTW, save yourself the hassle and don’t buy Seagate, they run too hot and have a consistently high failure rate in my 30 years experience with them. In the past five years they’ve developed a tendency to “self brick” due to buggy firmware... nothing physically wrong with the drive but it won’t spin up. You can get a free replacement but they won’t save your data or you can perform a complicated procedure with a home-made serial cable to enter CLI commands directly to the drive or... simply don’t buy Seagate.

Question 3

Can this item be used to access old files and photo from an HDD that was on a different computer?

Accepted Answer

The short answer is yes. This is a common interface typical of several USB interfaces. It is only SATA it will not support the older PATA or parallel ATA drives. It works on or with any computer whether Microsoft, Apple, or Linux but that does not mean you can take an Apple or Linux drive and access it on Microsoft. In some cases depending on how the drive was formatted it may be accessed from another platform but not always. This is a very useful item. The only downside is it will only duplicate to a bigger drive. If you want to duplicate a drive to the same size use a clone program that you download from the new drive's manufacturer. Then this drive docking station can be used with that software for that purpose as well as a large number of other things.

Question 4

Can this be used to permanently house two HDDs for use as a Storage Space or other RAID 1 unit?

Accepted Answer

Yes it could be used for a permanent station but I would not recommend it. My reasoning is the lack of decent ventilation for heat disposition that hard drives give off.

Question 5

Can I clone a 1TB hard drive to another 1 TB hard drive?

Accepted Answer

Yes you can via the button on the front of the unit (there is no software for cloning included). You press and hold the button for a few seconds and it will start the cloning process assuming no the drives are good. There is a YouTube video about cloning drives with the docking station. Check it out. The instructions included are not much help.

Question 6

When using "Safe to Remove" and you have 2 drives running in the device, can you disable each drive separately allowing you to remove JUST 1 drive while continuing to use the 2nd drive, or does "Safe to Remove" force you to disable both drives at once?

Accepted Answer

I never bothered to think about this scenario but the way it acknowledges presence of drives in bays and the way I usually eject them it should eject each drive independently. I will use  caution not to eject one drive while 2nd drive is in use, eject one when both of them are idle.

Question 7

Not clear if this clones the total physical drive including partitions.  It would seem so, but one comment was to use disk manager to shrink the source drive so you could clone it to a smaller target drive.  Bottom line is if I have a drive with 3 partitions, will it clone all three partitions to a new, larger drive?

Accepted Answer

I vaguely remember one WAVLINK USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay Hard Drive Docking Station. I  returned the product for a refund. I went to Source Forge and downloaded Clonezilla. I then used the provisions for adding additional drives within the computer case to make bootable 
backup copies of the system hard drive. The process is basically trivial when I remember to 
disconnect power before adding and removing the backup drive copies.

Disconnect power before swapping drives and replace the original drive with the WAVLINK clone and see if the clone will boot the system.

Source Forge is not a store, and Clonezilla is not sold and does not have a price.

Question 8

I have several hard drives removed from old computers.  Can this be used to safely wipe all the data from the old removed hard drives using an existing PC?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but without additional software you can format, change  file structure (ie: fat / fat32),  repartition  and clean it so that an average person would no longer be able to find the information, but that is not sufficient to meet a gov't standard and intense (and expensive) scrutiny could recover much of the information. There did used to be utilities out there that would work, from symantec etc.  These utilities can be used once the disk is in the wavlink, but be VERY sure which disk you are working on.  (I use mine frequently) for "offline" backups.

Question 9

Hello, will this allow me to access some old documents & photos from an HDD that a pulled out from an old computer I am no longer using?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this should work fine.  Be sure to use static protection, and if the old computer is still functional, turn off secure boot. If the old computer was a Win 10 device, and the computer you are using now is a Win 7 device, it will ask you if you want to scan and fix the drive. I would not scan and fix the drive, or you may have issues getting it to work in the Win 10 computer again.  Issues with that. Keep in mind that viruses may be transported to the new computer from your old data, so keep your protection up to date. These are great products. Don't forget to eject the disk, wait for it, then switch off the power and wait for it to spin down, so you don't damage the still rotating disks.

Question 10

I have several HDDs that work fine with another card reader, but when I insert them into the Wavlink they all come up as "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". I'm using an iMac... any ideas why this is happening?

Accepted Answer

This may not be compatible with your mac. I have no problem copying information from one drive to another in this docking station. I do not use a mac. I use a real computer, a PC.

Questions & Answers