$17 way of migrating to SSD  

I stumbled upon this Startech Portable Dock/Cloner/Duplicator on Bestbuy.ca for only over $16.

Startech Portable SATA Hard Drive Duplicator With eSATA and USB (SATDUPUE) : Storage Accessories - Best Buy Canada

Other sites are selling it for a higher price up to more than twice this price. So to satisfy my curiosity, I purchased one. If it doesn't work, I can always return it back to the store anyway.
But after testing it to clone a Mac OSX and Windows OS (standalone without a help of a PC), this is now a keeper. It gave a smooth boot up on any OS. This will become handy in the future like perhaps copying a dying drive or just a test dock for an OS (boot up via eSATA port on it). It also has USB port. Very versatile little thing.

theog said:

Under £19 at dads UK
StarTech.com eSATA USB to SATA HDD dock (SATDUPUEGB) - dabs.com

Looks handy.

Yeah, that's almost $29 canadian. Almost double but yeah I think it's still worth it.

I like that.. may get one!
:)

Btw, before diving in to get one I must also let you know that like all other standalone duplicator/cloning docks, when cloning with this device, the destination drive must be equal or greater than the capacity of the source drive. On my photo above, I am cloning from a clean install backups on 80GB drives (got those drives for $15 each from local store). So, direct (no PC) cloning may not work with everyone. But it can be used as a dock to migrate to SSD using a PC with software that supports cloning from bigger capacity hard drives to smaller capacity hard drives like Free Macrium Reflect or Paragon MigrateOS software.

Here is a link for the Manual

labeeman said:

Here is a link for the Manual

Thanks. The device came with a printed manual with the same exact content. :)

You are welcome. Most of the time it is better to look over the manual before purchase. Some times the manufacture does not make the manual available I do not purchase those items because of that practice.

badrobot said:

Thanks. The device came with a printed manual with the same exact content. :)

I do like a PDF manual some times the paper one is lost or of such fine print that you need a magnifier to read it.