The Wiebetech Traydock - The "Ultimate" Hot-Swappable Firewire/USB Drive Enclosure for IDE and SATA drives
Written: Aug 08 '05 (Updated Aug 21 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Performance, Flexibility/Expandibility, Build Quality, Ease of Use
Cons: Price, Size
The Bottom Line: The ultimate external hard drive for those who value performance, reliability, and flexibility.
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| nc10's Full Review: WiebeTech (TDK0IDE) USB Internal Drive Case |
The Wiebetech Traydock is an external, hot swappable hard drive enclosure that can be used with both SATA and IDE drives. Providing both maximum flexibility and maximum performance, it has both a USB 2.0 port and dual (daisy chainable) Firewire 800 ports.
The TrayDock, as its name implies, is really just a docking station (albeit a well contructed, highly flexible and high tech docking station) for drives which are installed in one of two types of trays, either for IDE or SATA drives. The trays are similar to a hard drive bay that you might find in a high end PC case with a few exceptions.
- the front of the tray has a black faceplate with aluminum latching lever, a blue and a yellow LED, and a lock
- the back of the tray has an edge connector which “plugs into the TrayDock housing
- The tray has an IDE or SATA cable and power cable to connect to the drive.
Wiebetech sells the TrayDock in several configurations, with either an empty IDE or SATA tray, or with IDE or SATA drives from 160 to 500gb. Additional empty trays, or trays with drives are also available.
The TrayDock is all metal, black in color with silver/aluminum trim (cooling fins on each side, and latch in front). The low profile TrayDock is about 1 1/8” thick, 6” wide, and about 11” long. There are two firewire 800 ports, a USB port, on/off toggle switch, and power connection on the back of the drive. A separate power block has two cables, one to the drive, and one to your 110V outlet, each about 6’ long.
Note: I've been using the traydock for about 2 months, after requesting a loaner review model from Wiebetech to test out and use alongside a couple of other external drives that I own. After receiving the request, Wiebetech shipped a new, retail boxed model with no questions asked, so that I could write a review to be posted here.
In a few words…..
Having no internal fan, Traydock drives tend to be very quiet. The drive I tested had no heat problems, the unobtrusive external cooling fins seem to be more than adequate. The drive is on the heavy side, the Traydock and power block together weigh almost 4 lbs. Its large size and weight make it a poor choice for those who want to travel light, but is perfect for those who value performance, flexibility and reliability.
The drive is very easy to setup, and is one of the best performing external drives you can buy. Its solidly built (and “looks” expensive), and it offers complete flexibility (Firewire and USB support, works with both IDE and SATA drives). The “hot swapping” feature works as advertised, you can unlatch a tray, pull it and out, and install another one, with out disconnecting any cables or powering down. The Traydock is a powerful, flexible, yet easy to use system for adding extra IDE or SATA internal drives drives to any Win XP, 2000 or Mac system.
Installation
In the box you’ll find the TrayDock housing itself, and either a SATA or IDE tray, 1 FireWire 800 cable, 1 USB cable, AC adapter, an information CD, and keys to unlock the Traydock tray latch. Optionally, you can buy Traydocks with a drive installed, which was my case. I received a TrayDock with a 160gb 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda hard drive installed, FAT32 formatted.
The Traydock is compatible with the Win XP, Win 2000, and Mac 9.2/OS X operating systems, no software is required or included. The included information CD is just that, documentation and Wiebetech product information, no drivers for Win 98 systems, and no other software. The Firewire cable has Firewire 800 connectors (9 pin) on each end, if your PC or laptop has 6 pin or 4 pin (Firewire 400) ports, you’ll need to purchase another cable or adapter.
If you already have a drive installed in your Traydock, setting the drive up is trivial. Plug it in. Turn it on. Connect the USB or firewire cable to your PC. (In any order.) Once all steps are done, you PC will recognize the drive, and you can start using it just like any other drive.
Installing a drive is easy too. Connect the power cable and the IDE or SATA cable on the drive tray to your drive, set the drive in the tray, then tighten 4 screws and the tray is ready to slide into the TraydDock.
Performance
I connected the TrayDock to several PC’s and a laptop, and ran the HD Tach benchmark utility (www.simplisoftware.com). HD Tach reports sequential and burst read speeds for drives, random access times, and cpu utilization. It’s a free and easy to use program that allows you get a quick read on drive performance. I also ran the Sisoft Sandra benchmark in a few cases, and performed a few "real world" tests.
I hooked up the TrayDock to two different Dell 4550 desktop PC’s (with a 2.4 and a 2.66ghz cpu), a Dell 8400 desktop with a 3 ghz cpu, a home built PC with a Athlon 750 mhz cpu, and a Dell 9200 laptop with a 1.86ghz centrino CPU, all running Windows XP and all with USB 2.0 ports).
USB Performance
I’ve found that, when connected via a USB port, this drive performs slightly better, by anywhere from 5-20%, than other USB hard drives I've tested (a 250gb Hitachi drive in a Compusa drive case, and a Western Digital 120 Dual Option backup drive). To get a feel for performance, I ran two hard disk benchmark programs (HD Tach and Sisoft Sandra), and timed copying a single large file, and a large directory of small files. (All other things being equal, copying 100mb worth of small files takes much longer than copying a single 100mb file)
When the drive was connected to several different PC’s through the USB port, I found that HD Tach reported average read speeds anywhere from 10.7mb/sec on the older 750mhz athlon system, to 32mb/sec on the newest Dell 8400 system, a huge variation. I ran a second benchmark program, Sisoft Sandra’s File benchmark test, and got very similar results. With a bit more testing, I learned that USB drive performance is function (as you might expect) of how fast a system is, and how many other things are connected to the USB ports on a system.
On my fastest system, with no other devices, HD Tach reported this drive had an average read speed of 32.4 mb/sec, with a burst speed of 35mb/sec. Sisoft Sandra reported a Drive performance rating of 25.7.
In a “real world” file copy tests, using a single 517 mb avi file, and a 250mb directory of 12,500 files, I found I could copy the single large file from the TrayDock to my PC in about 24 seconds (22mb/sec). The 250mb directory of 12500 files took much longer to copy from the Traydock to my PC, about 2 minutes and 7 seconds (2mb/sec). On some of the slower systems with several USB devices, it took over twice as long to copy these files.
FireWire Performance
Unfortunately I was not able to test this drive on a PC with a Firewire 800 port, but did test it on a PC with a Firewire 400 port, a Dell 4550 desktop with a 2.66ghz cpu. On this system, when I connected the TrayDock to the USB port, HD Tach reported average read speeds from 14 to 30mb/sec, depending on how many other USB devices were connected. When connected to the firewire port on this PC, HD Tach reported an average read speed of 37.7 mb/sec, with burst speeds of 40mb/sec. Sisoft Sandra reported a Drive Index of almost 28mb/second. ( Drive Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. The Drive Index is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC-SiSoftware Sandra Help File In the real world tests, I was able to copy the 517mb file from this drive to my PC in 19 seconds (27mb/sec), and the 250mb directory of 12500 files copied in about 90 seconds (~2.8mb seconds).
Using the Firewire connection, the drive performed about 20% better than the best USB performance I could get, and in some cases, on PC's with many other USB devices, it provides double the performance. Though I could not test this drive with a Firewire 800 port, I'd expect using Firewire 800 would provide another performance boost of 50-75% (based on other reviews I've read comparing Firewire 400 and 800 connected devices).
Support
The TrayDock comes with a 1 year warranty covering parts and labor. A few FAQ’s are available at the Wiebetech website, free email, toll and toll free phone support is available 7:30 to 5 Monday through Friday. Wiebetech does offer one download on their website, a patch for Win XP service pack 2 users, to address Firewire 800 problems which were part of the Win XP SP2 update. (Weibetech recommends Firewire 800 users do not update to SP2).
Recommended:
Yes
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