I bought one of these a few months ago, but they seem to repeatedly come up when Aldi’s are doing a tech special week.
The only thing I can say is DO NOT BUY!
They have a fundamental problem in that they don’t fit any hard drives! I have tried 6 different drives from 2.5″ laptop drives to 3.5″ full desktop drives and none of them fit!
The problem seems to be that the plastic casing gets in the way of the the drive mounting into the sockets. This doesn’t seem to be a tolerance error on this particular unit either as the case is locked into a base. I haven’t taken this all apart yet (as that looks like a nightmare of a job), but I really should not need to do that, and neither should you. Just don’t be fooled into buying it!
I also tried the After Sales Support telephone number on the bottom of the unit and that is unobtainable!
btw. This one is a Bauhn Product Number 36732.
the problem seems to be that you have no **** idea what a laptop or desktop drive actually is. How can you review something you have absolutely no **** idea about?
Actually the docking station is supposed to take both laptop and desktop size drives and certainly would have if the plastic enclosure had allowed it. Best case was to take the enclosure off.
However thanks for pointing out I was thinking of drives long gone when I gave the sizes. It should have been 2.5 and 3.5 of coarse so I’ve corrected my post.
Btw If you want to write a reasonably intelligent comment, perhaps you should write it in a reasonably intelligent way!?
Good luck if you buy one btw. I saw they were up again. Hopefully they have changed the enclosure.
There seems to be a misunderstanding at the base of your review: these docking stations are for naked drives only! Anything in some kind of housing will not fit, cannot fit, never was meant to fit.
Actually yes, I hope my post is clear, I am talking about bare drives here.
Just to be totally clear, I’m talking about the enclosure of the Aldi drive bay, the side if this was about 2mm too close to the SATA connection to allow the drive itself to fit into the connector. The connectors themselves are correct but the enclosure/housing of the bay prevents docking. I could get it to work by ripping the plastic off the dock, but let’s face it, that’s a lot of work!
I had a look at the way the dock is built too and without modification of the moulding or a physical relocation of the connector, I could not see how my device could have been individual incorrect. To me it looked like a docking station design error where something the thickness of the plastic enclosure of the docking station was not taken into account.
I’ll try and get some images to show the problem, but it’s very difficult to get a camera in there with reasonable lighting.
I’m hoping that they have fixed this in the latest batch, but I’d be vary wary and would probably take an old drive in to try it.
I bought one when they first came up, not easy to insert drive, but can do so. Just need to keep drive flush with vertical plastic enclosure.
I have bought a second one so that I can access several drives at once for transfers of files. It doesn’t work on USB3, but fine on “regular”USB. My main problem is there is no explanation on which bay is Source and which is Destination if a cloning is attempted! The book instructions are as vague as can be.
Thanks James. Mine was impossible to insert drives. But it’s good to know that they weren’t all as bad as mine.
Can you let us know if you are going to clone which bays to use as source and destination? Also did you buy one of the ones that was advertised this week? Is that one better? I couldn’t really tell from the images whether it was a new model or not.
The “old” one was branded Fission and front bay marked as A and rear bay B. I assume the A would be Source and B Destination. I may run a test using 2 drives with redundant data to test my assumption and if I am wrong, then no loss. There are no such labels (A&B) on the new one branded Bauhn which I bought yesterday, other than that they seem identical in case design and function.
They both work fine on USB 2.0 (my USB 3.0 is a cheap one from Woolworths, so it may be at fault).
I take it you know they are SATA and not IDE. If you keep them flush with circuit side against case they do fit in, but it’s a tight fit and have to exert a bit of pressure to make sit home.
Actually both types of drives do fit the device, you simply have to linne the sata connections up. I have used them on both sizes and they work well. However, the clone function does not work as it should. No blinking lights even when drives have started.
The source and target slotts are actually described in the very brief manual -not good enough, the source is the front slot nearest the large button.
Received one of these units as a Christmas gift last year and finally decided to test it out on a 1TB drive I removed from a WD Elements external HDD case – it doesn’t work!?!
When the HDD is not in the unit and I power it on, lights 1 & 4 turn on to indicate the unit is functioning correctly however, when I turn the unit off, insert the 1TB SATA HDD into either slot A or B, no light appear on the unit and the transformer’s green light flashes intermittent green instead of solid green as before (when no drives where inserted). Thoughts anyone?
I’ve read elsewhere that to use clone function it has to be stand alone
ie USB cord UNPLUGGED I’ve not been able to test this as I’ve misplaced my power supply and can’t remember what it looks like
the later model AHD-06 09/13. Fits drives ok
Earlier fussion and bauhn models were not made right and (without force) drives wouldn’t fit
this is a good unit. have several. yes they are tight and that is the point. tight fitment maintains good contact. it is a very good unit for a home one. we do drive work professionally and we pay thousands of dollars for most of out equipment. this is cheap and great quality.
I had to dismantle mine and cut away some plastic to get it to accept a 3.5″ drive.
Husband borrowed one and it had not a problem.
Hard drive fit and everything was simple and easy.