With among others Firewire ports the dock is uniquely designed for use with the Mac.
With this dock the integration and use is actually to be installed internally Direction disk as external storage media easily. The disks are mounted properly in the dock after insertion and then appear in the Finder or on the desktop. Data can be stored on it as usual. In addition, the disk with the Disk Utility can format any.
The handling is very intuitive, but you should carefully insert the internal HDDs in the dock, so that they engage properly also. In addition, the HDDs used to have a little room to move in the Dock. The work area should be therefore not exposed to too much movement.
In a Mac environment, it is readily possible to boot the system from data carriers that are connected via this dock to your Mac.
Purposes described above do not work only with classic hard drives, but also with SSDs.
I have the dock for the following scenario purchased: There should be a Samsung SSD 840 installed Pro Series 512GB in my MacBook Pro 13 "early in 2011 end, the original internal HDD should previously on the new, located in the Dock and Firewire connected SSD. be cloned and these are hereafter installed in place of the original internal HDD in the MacBook Pro.
Cloning should initially via the Disk Utility (local category "Restore"), which was invoked by a restart on the recovery partition effected. The cloning process went without a hitch here at first, after a while, but did nothing more; the progress of the cloning process did not change and the SSD no data has been written, which was also evident that the dock, which signaled data throughput LED is no longer flashing. Repeating this process led to the same negative result.
Since it did not seem to work with the Disk Utility, I tried it on the third-party software, here the Carbon Copy Cloner. But the result was the same, the cloning process was freezing after a while.
Apparently there was some problem in cloning an internal HDD to via firewire on the dock connected SSD. However, the mistake I could not make out.
Then I decided to refrain from cloning to obstruct the new SSD and restore the system from the Time Machine backup, which worked without hesitation and went perhaps even faster in the end, as the system to clone beforehand. The dock was not used in this workaround.
Whether the error when cloning on the here under assessment Dock is due, I can not say, therefore, no deduction in the evaluation. For the one or other the like described here but surely be helpful.
In summary, I recommend the dock for daily use for use actually internal disk as an external disk.
