USB 3.0 SATA Lay Flat Hard Drive Dock is awesome

Today, my plugable had arrived, 8 days before expected arrival date!

I bought it primarily because I wanted to monitor S.M.A.R.T. status of my drives without having to plug drive into a PC computer case. Another reason, is that I wanted to move from buying removable drives to just buying bare drives. Buying just drives is cheaper, but more importantly, it gives you complete control over brands and types of drives you use.

I have late 2008 MacBook Pro, which only has USB 2.0 ports. The good news are is that docking station works fine and reports S.M.A.R.T. status perfectly on my machine! Only thing I had to do is to install open source driver “OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver” from https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-S…

There’s cool free command-line utility “smartmontools” which can give compete S.M.A.R.T. status about the drive. It also can instruct a disk to perform a self-test. That’s not one of those simple read/write tests, but the one that are done by drive’s controller and are part of the S.M.A.R.T.
On a Mac Os X, you can get this utility by installing “MacPorts” and then “sudo port install smartmontools”.

All in all, I’m very happy with my purchase.

Keep up the good work Plugable!

Thanks so much for your kind words and especially for the great tips and links to the kasbert open source SMART driver. Nice to see this all working on a Macbook Pro from 2008!

Thanks again!
Bernie Thompson
Founder, Plugable Technologies