StarTech Standalone Hard Drive Eraser And USB 3.0 Dock Capsule Review
by Billy Tallis on February 16, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- USB 3.0
- SATA
- DAS
- StarTech.com
Final Words
The StarTech Standalone Hard Drive Eraser and USB 3.0 Dock's feature set is great, and there are no obvious omissions. All of its features are easy to use and as self-explanatory as can be expected from a screen that only shows two lines of text; no manual is needed, but a one-page leaflet further clarifies how to use the device.
The dock's performance is functional, but disappointing. The USB dock capability is clearly a secondary concern. It's fast enough to mostly keep pace with a mechanical hard drive, but its performance with a solid state drive is much worse than we would have expected based just on the SATA 2 and USB 3.0 speed limits. Its random access performance is particularly bad and clearly much worse than some external SSDs we've tested that are also using USB to SATA bridge chips. This isn't a device anyone should consider as their primary external storage interface. In the context of data security it is sufficient for inspecting what's on a drive or perhaps for re-imaging after wiping. If you don't need to erase drives routinely, you can get higher-performing docks for a fraction of the cost: this dock has a MSRP of $283.99 compared to only $71.99 for a StarTech USB 3.1 dock that supports 6Gbps SATA and UASP.
As a hard drive eraser, the performance is also a concern. Despite sustaining over 200MB/s of writes over USB, its full-drive overwrite modes only wipe drives at 125MB/s. In some cases this won't matter, as a big drive might need to be left as an overnight job either way, but issuing the same write command with an incremented logical block address shouldn't be hard. It seems likely that the FPGA is being used to implement a processor core that just isn't fast enough; it also seems like that processor is getting in the way for the USB mode when the SATA commands should be passed directly to the drive. Fortunately, the dock is equipped to receive firmware updates, so StarTech might be able to improve things. If the time taken to wipe a hard drive is not a concern, then the eraser dock is a very convenient turnkey solution. If you have to process a very large number of drives and especially if you have to image large batches of drives, a computer with multiple hot-swap bays will be preferable.
The one mode where I have no performance complaints is also the mode I actually need. Performing an ATA Secure Erase under Windows is inconvenient at best and frequently impossible. With the addition of a hot-swap bay to our SSD testbed PC, what had been the most ridiculously complicated step of the test procedure is now foolproof and fast. With a minimum of ten erases per drive needed for our client drive test suite, the eraser dock is a very welcome tool and it's just about perfect for this use case.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
buhusky - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
I'm sorry, did I miss the part where you verified it securely erased everything or did you just take it at its word?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
It depends on what you mean. When using the ATA Secure Erase mode, the dock is most definitely issuing the correct commands. What the drive does with that command is up to the drive, not the dock. Reading out the contents of the drive and checking that every byte is zero is not sufficient to verify that the drive's Secure Erase procedure actually got rid of all the data securely, because you can't read what's in spare area or remapped sectors without opening up the drive. I didn't do a full run and verification of the single-pass write zeros erase, but I did confirm that it was spending the time actually writing zeroes to the drive.Avalon - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Seems like a waste to me. If you need to be in the business of securely erasing drives, you're going to buy a multi-bay dock to get this done. My old IT company had several 8 and 16 bay duplicators/erasers on hand to process large amount of drives.If you're doing it for personal use, well, there's much cheaper ways to do this. I don't see a market for this device.
Wolfpup - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Wow, this is great! I've got one in my cart right now. I've wanted something like this for YEARS.Guess I'll plan to run the secure erase first on anything I'm getting rid of, then run the best-mode overwrite for the hell of it.
I don't really care about the performance, as long as it's doing its job. Just thrilled if I can have something simple like this to take care of such an annoying job...and I don't even need it near a computer, can plug it in anywhere with a spare outlet and let the thing run!
extide - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Page covering pop up ad!http://images.teraknor.net/popup-ad.png
xrror - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Am I the only one cackling madly at the disaster potential for this device?"oops, I guess it was in the wrong mode"
azrael- - Thursday, February 18, 2016 - link
Was just about to write pretty much the same thing.You've got to really, really, really make sure this thing is in the correct mode, because otherwise you suddenly have a lot more free space than you thought. ;-)
xrror - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
hehe... 100% compression! ;pboozed - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Probably cheaper than buying a Mac and running Adobe CC on it too.DataMD - Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - link
Looks a handy tool for erasing small numbers of hard drives. Would be keen to understand what independent testing has been carried out to ensure all data is eradicated and whether this item has gained, or intends to gain, accreditations and government approval.