Lindy USB 2.0 & eSATA Cloning Adapter review

Lindy’s Cloning Adaptor has several functions packed into its small shape. It has two SATA interfaces, a USB2 port and an eSATA port, and is designed to clone one hard disk to another bit by bit. It can also mount one or two hard disks over USB2 or eSATA, so you can access their data without opening up your PC or screwing the disks into external hard disk enclosures.

The adapter can take desktop 3.5″ or laptop 2.5″ drives, and is powered from the mains via a power brick. We had no problems mounting two hard disks at the same time over either interface, and this let us copy files to and from the disks to the host PC and between each other.

When fitted with a 7200rpm desktop hard disk, transfer speeds over USB2 were reasonable, if slower than we’re used to from external desktop hard disks; we saw 26.8MB/s average when reading and writing large files, and 11.9MB/s when reading and writing small files. Over eSATA speeds were similar to when we mounted the hard disk inside our test PC, with 50.2MB/s average when reading and writing large files and 31.5MB/s for small.

Unfortunately, we had no luck getting the disk cloning aspect to work at all. The instructions say that the target disk needs to be unformatted and with no partitions, but when we connected an NTFS-formatted disk as the source and an unformatted disk as the target, the disks would appear to spin up after we pressed the clone button, but even after leaving it overnight the second disk remained blank. We tried several different disks, but to no avail.

The Cloning Adaptor works well as a versatile dual-disk external USB2 and eSATA mount, but you’ll have to clone your disks via your PC.