Unitek Y-1071 2.5"/3.5" SATA Hard Drive USB3.0 Docking Station

Comment:
I purchased this for use with the Unitek USB 3.0 to PCIe adapter card. The docking station comes with a 6-foot USB 3.0 cable and a power brick with a cable that's also roughly 6 feet long. The dock has a power indicator but no drive activity light. The rear contains the power and USB 3.0 connections, and a power switch which IMHO is upside down (you press the bottom part of the switch to turn the unit on).I had a bit of trouble getting my 64-bit Windows 7 system to recognize the unit at first - the problem seems to have been an imperfect cable connection at the docking station end. With some wiggling I was able to get the connection established and it seems fairly solid now, but I'm a little wary of it. I'll try to report back here if I have any additional problems with it.My habit is to insert  the drive with the power off, then turn the power on. When I do this I get the audible tone that Windows plays when a new USB device is detected and the drive becomes available. To remove the drive I use the "Safely Remove Hardware" option to dismount the drive, then I turn the dock power switch off and remove the drive.The SATA connectors are designed to allow a drive to be safely removed with the power still applied, so strictly speaking it's not necessary to power it down. But I found that using the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon and removing the drive with the power still on did NOT result in the USB device itself being released (there was no "USB disconnected" sound). This means that it's not possible to use a new drive without unplugging/replugging the dock or cycling it's power. In this respect it works just like a USB-attached flash card reader. So if you use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon then you should expect to have to power-cycle the dock when you switch drives.In terms of transfer speeds, I saw speeds of up to 100MByte/sec while copying files to or from a 1TB WD Green drive - much, much better than the 30-35MByte/sec max I see with my USB 2.0 devices.The dock is supposed to accept both 3.5" and 2.5" SATA drives - I've tested it with 3.5" drives but don't have any of the smaller drives to try. A 3.5" drive plugs in easily. There's a little extra room in bay so you have to be conscious of positioning the drive to the left/rear as you lower it into the dock in order to get the connectors line up. It's straightforward to do and I haven't had any problems getting drives to connect properly.One nice little thing I appreciate is that there's a clear plastic cover for the dock included in the package. It doesn't really feel like it's meant to be permanent, partly because there's no cutout at the back so that you can put it over the dock with the cables still attached. But I used scissors to cut out a piece of the plastic and now I used it to keep dust out of the dock when it's not in use.I plan to use this for a month or two and if I have no further problems with the cable I'll likely buy another one so that I can do high-speed drive-to-drive transfers.