Backing up: The OWC Voyager Q hard drive dock, a quick review

[Ellis Vener]

Voyager Q hard drive dock from OWC: quick review

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock

Pretty slick and easy to use. After powering it up and it connecting to your computer you turn it off, drop a bare SATA drive ( 2.5 or 3.5 inch) into the slot on top. Then power it back up, format the drive and then start backing up. I making my first set of back ups presently, and will then make a duplicate set for off site storage. I went with the Voyager Q as it has USB 3.0, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and eSATA connections. Cables for all connectors are included in the package.

I have several redundant bare SATA HDDs sitting around so I didn't have to purchase any for this purpose. I am backing up about 4TB of data so I'll be using 3x 1.5TB Western Digital Green Drives.

There is not much else to say about it. If it works it works.

[studio347]

I have an older version of Voyager Q. I like it very much.
One weakness though... after around 20 or 30 minutes, the HD becomes very hot. Recently, I got a small USB-powered fan and it solved the problem!
It's not a simple-clean setup with a small fan, but it's kind of fun!

One more thing for the old version, the firewire & USB 2 connection of older Voyager Q, doesn't work with 3TB HD. The eSata works with 3 TB HD.
...make sure that the newer one works with 3TB HD + firewire.

[Kirk Gittings]

I've been using them for years-a slightly earlier version. They work pretty well. I use them with Carbon Copy Cloner on Macs and Casper on my PCs. Only draw back on the eSATA-if you don't have portmultiplier capability on your eSATA PC cards you can't hot swap (without rebooting or scanning for hardware changes)-otherwise the USBs are all hot swapable.

[francois]

I have a couple of them, the older version and they work wonderfully well. It's true that the docked HDs become very hot, especially during long cloning session but I never bothered to cool them.