Computer storage comes in many forms and we need to have it for everything really, I’m the type of person who doesn’t care of the cloud and I put everything on hard drives for my backups. I don’t keep the drives in my computer because you never know what will happen, a virus can affect all the drives and that would be bad so I use something like the products I have for review today, a hot-swap dock. Today for review I have the iStarUSA BPN-DE110SS-WB Trayless Hot-Swap Cage with Wood Look Bezel which fits into a 5.25” bay and it allows you to put a standard 3.5” hard drive into it to transfer data back and forth and then just remove it when you’re done. The iStar dock I have for review today is trayless meaning you can just put the drive in and that’s it, no tray to mess with which I love as it makes life so much easier. What makes this dock special is the look of it, it has a wood finish, yes that’s not something you’d expect from something tech related but it works and it looks good. Read on…

 

 

Unboxing

The dock just comes in a plain white box with a label on it and when you open it you’ll be greeted with the user manual which is just a piece of paper.

 

 

The dock is wrapped in protective plastic during shipping.

 

Included you’ll find a set of keys, four screws for mounting and a locking SATA cable.

 

 

Here’s the top and bottom of the dock, it’s mostly aluminum with plastic front and back.

 

What makes this dock different is the wood trim, and no it’s not real wood sadly, it’s just wood ‘look’ to it, it’s still metal underneath. It does look nice though.

 

 

Here’s a view of the door open, the wood look goes all around and not just the front.

 

If you look inside you’ll see the SATA power and data connections for the hard drive. You just slide the drive in and it connects for you, very simple. Here you can also see the small lever that’s used to push the drive out of the bay when you pull on the front handle.

 

On the back you’ll find slits for ventilation and over on the right a space for an optional 40mm cooling fan. On the back is also the SATA data and power connections along with switch to enable or disable the LED and a 2pin fan connector for that 40mm fan.