14 DAY TRIAL // For those end-users that want to use regular hard disk drives or solid state drives as external units, there are a variety of docks and special enclosures on today's market, and Sharkoon has just revealed its latest QuickPort Series product.
There is a number of reasons for which consumers would choose to somehow use their SATA drives externally, mostly related to convenience and/or ease of use.
The main two ways to do such a thing come in the form of enclosures or HDD/SSD docks.
Sharkoon has been a supplier of such docks for quite some time now and it seems that it is more than ready to offer yet another one.
This once, however, the new QuickPort Series member, known as QuickPort Series Mini, does not support as wide a range of drives as some of its siblings.
Basically, its use is restricted to hard disks or solid state drives which have the 2.5-inch form factor and use the SATA interface.
This allows the newcomer to measure just 85 x 55 x 45mm, making it small enough to fit inside a backpack or laptop bag and, thus, granting it some measure of mobility.
Granted, the fact that it cannot support 3.5-inch storage devices will naturally make it less than ideal for many end-users, since such drives usually have higher storage spaces and are quite common.
Those that do find themselves interested in the electronic, however, will be interested in knowing that there are two versions available.
One of them, the cheaper one which goes for 10 Euro, uses the USB 2.0 interface, whose maximum speed is of 480 Mbps.
The other model sells for 25 Euro and communicates with host PCs via the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard, which has a maximum theoretical throughput of about 5 Gbps.
Both work on just the power supplied by the host PC's USB port and are, of course, bundled with all the necessary cables.