Hard drive docking bays have become relatively popular because they are a simple and useful product, but with so many out there, companies need a way to make theirs stand out from the rest.

Late last year I took a look at the Kingwin EZ-Dock, it was one of the first HDD docking stations on the market and Kingwin has since come out with a new model the EZ-Dock2 that they've sent over for review. The EZ-Dock2 is a dual bay dock, meaning you can use two SATA hard drives with it, 2.5” or 3.5” or a mixture of both. It also has the ability to let the user configure RAID for the drives in the dock, either JBOD or Big/Spanned, all done via the USB connection. So read on to learn more...

Product Name: Kingwin EZ-Dock2 2.5"/3.5" Dual Bay SATA HDD Docking Station

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Sponsor: Kingwin

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

Kingwin EZ-Dock2 2.5"/3.5" Dual Bay SATA Hard Drive Docking Station

Features:

* Model: EZD-2536

* 2.5” / 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Docking Station

* Support 2 SATA I/II H.D.D.

* Support BIG & JBOD

* Up to 480 Mbps Data Transfer Rate In USB 2.0

* Plug and Play

* LED for H.D.D. Access & Power

* Rohs Compliant

* Compact Design w/ maximum heat dissipation & exhaust

Specifications:

H.D.D. Support: 2.5” / 3.5” Dual SATA Hard Discs

Transfer Rate: USB 2.0 up to 480Mbps

Dimension: 133 (W) x 123 (L) x 62 (H) mm

Support OS: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS 10x & Above

H.D.D. Capacity: Up To 2TB

Interface: USB 2.0

A Better Look at Things:

The Kingwin EZ-Dock2 comes in a colorful little box and it's packaged in an anti-static bag.

Included with the dock is a power supply, driver disc for Windows 98, user manual and a USB cable.

The dock is made of hard plastic as is expected, so it's lightweight and seems well made for plastic. On the front is the EZ-Dock2 logo, and on the top, above the logo are three LED indicators for power, HDD1 and 2 activity.

On the back is where you'll find the power button, power input, dip switches for mode settings and the USB connection.

Here's the settings for the dip switches in case you're curious:

Looking at it from the top we can see the SATA connections. Inside there are labels for the 2.5” drives, the little spacers or blocks inside look as though they might get in the way of installing a 3.5” drive but they don't, they're spring loaded and push down into the unit.

Installation, Testing and Comparison:

You can use 3.5” and 2.5” SATA drives, standard or SSD, with the EZ-Dock2 and you can use both sizes at the same time as well.

When the drives are in the unit they are a bit wobbly, the EZ-Dock2 doesn't seem to support the drives very well, they will move back and forth if touched, but I didn't run into any problems with it though.

Using it in JBOD mode is easy, just set the switches and plug it in, easy to do, no problems, the drives appear as separate drives. Using it in BIG or Spanned mode though is different, you'll need to go into Disk Management and create the Span, something the manual lacks in telling you. If you read the manual it does not mention anything about having to configure it, it seems as though this is done automatically by the unit itself, but it's not.

I was curious as to the performance of the drives in the EZ-Dock2, so I loaded up SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3 and ran the Removable Storage Benchmark to see how it performs. I used my two Seagate 2.5” drives for the testing. In the charts I've compared a single drive, directly connected via SATA to my computer and then with the drives in the EZ-Dock2 in JBOD and BIG modes.

As expected the direct SATA connection is better than a USB connection, and we can see JBOD works better than spanning.

Here's the 256MB Files Test results:

No difference at all to be seen...

Oh well.. it works.

Summary and Comments:

The Kingwin EZ-Dock2 is a great little gadget for those of us that have several loose drives floating around, it's well made and it works as it should. I really like the idea of having two spaces for HDDs, that way I can access two drives instead of just one obviously..

The idea of the raid Spanning is more of a novelty I think, I don't see a real use for it, I personally cannot see myself leaving two drives in there all of the time, but someone might find a use for it. Leaving your drives in there spanned is kind of pointless as it defeats the purpose of having the HDD dock in the first place, the idea is to be able to swap them out quickly to transfer data to and from them.

Having two slots for hard drives is nice, especially for someone like me that's always playing with hard drives.

DragonSteelMods gives the Kingwin EZ-Dock2 a 4.5 out of 5 score.

Pros:

-Easy to use

-Seems well made

-Works with both 2.5” and 3.5” drives

-No drivers required for newer OS

-Two bays to access more drives

Cons:

-Manual isn't quite clear on setting up raid, not as easy as just flipping a switch

-Doesn't seem to support the drives too well

I would like to thank Kingwin for the chance to review the EZ-Dock2 and for their continued support of DSM.

review# 580

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