14 DAY TRIAL // External storage devices are all well and good, but for those who have regular SATA drives lying about, Japanese company Marshal has created a pair of enclosures and a docking station.
The three devices that Marshal has created are called MAL-3235SBK, MAL-3335SBKU and MAL-3635SBK.
The first two are external drive enclosures, while the third is a special kind of SATA drive dock.
We are going to look at the MAL-3635SBK dock first, since it is so unique among its peers, design-wise anyway.
The main unit is nothing but a cuboidal box that handles up to four SATA drives in the 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch form factor.
The other component is an ABS stand that extends out and above the base, holding the drives in place and leading to an exposed look not often encountered.
The role of the dock is to clone the content on a PC, which means this is a backup solution instead of a quick transfer one.
In fact, the Japanese company did not even bother implementing the USB 3.0 interface, settling for USB 2.0 instead.
That said, the MAL-3635SBK has a native drive cloning logic that can automatically back up three drives, at a time, from one template, without needing a host PC of its own.
The MAL-3235SBK and MAL-3335SBKU drive enclosures are similar to each other in that they support one or two units each.
Their design is not much different either (they are basically black boxes with LED indicators on the front).
Still, the former does not support RAID and communicates via USB 2.0, while the latter can configure drives in RAID mode and even has USB 3.0.
Shipments should start this month (March, 2012). The MAL-3235SBK and MAL-3335SBKU enclosures will have prices of 3,580 JPY ($42 / 32 Euro) and 4,980 JPY ($60 / 46 Euro), while the MAL-3635SBK dock carries a tag of 9,980 JPY ($119 / 91 Euro).
