Introduction

The storage side of the industry is rather interesting at the moment with plenty of things happening. It's hard not to be interested. We finally saw the introduction of SATA-III which doubles the speed over SATA-II. And around the same time we just saw USB 3.0 come in, too, which while not strictly a straight up storage standard, will get folks excited who like fast external storage transfer speeds, being able to offer up to ten times faster speeds than USB 2.0.

A company by the name of Sharkoon made the "hard drive toaster" famous several years ago when it launched its first QuickPort docking station product.

Sticking with the times, Sharkoon is back again and has just launched its SATA QuickPort USB 3.0 "Toaster" 2.5 and 3.5-inch Docking Station. It offers up to 5Gbit/s transfers, which is faster than SATA-II and only a little slower than SATA-III at 6Gbit/s.

After taking a close look at the product on video, we put it to the test with an Intel SSD drive and see what it can do and if that extra USB 3.0 bandwidth can be put to use.

Let's move on now!