I’ve talked about various solutions for connecting a bare hard drive externally to your computer in previous posts. They were just some flavor of cabling. Today I’ll look at a docking station that makes the solution a lot more elegant while also adding features. Yes, I’ll provide a link to Amazon for purchase and it would get a very small commission. No, I didn’t get a free one.

Here is a photo with measurements of the WAVLINK USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station. Overall, it is fairly small even though it supports two separate drives. Each of the slots has both a SATA data and power interface so you just plug in your drive(s). The WAVLINK box comes with a power adapter as well as a USB cable to connect to your computer.

I can see two distinct ways the WAVLINK docking station could be useful to me. First, it gives me a convenient way to plug in a bare drive to access the data on it. This is a scenario that comes up for me once or twice a year and I have to find the cable that allows me to do it. It would be much easier to just have the docking station on my desk at all times to plug in a drive.

A feature offered by the docking station is the option to clone one drive to another directly on the docking station. I’ve not had such a need, but it sure would be handy should I ever need to clone a drive.

If you ever have the need to access or clone a SATA drive without having to put it in a computer, this is a very elegant solution!