NewerTech Voyager Q Quad Interface Dock for 2.5" and 3.5" Serial ATA Drives

by NewerTech

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 6.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B0026S7HP0
• Item model number: NWTFWU3ES2HDK
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)

Product Description

The Voyager Q Quad Interface Dock for 2.5" and 3.5" Serial ATA Drives from Newer Technology is an extremely convenient way to access data on a SATA internal drive without having to install that drive into your computer. The Voyager Q can hold drives of either the 2.5" or 3.5" form factor that are no greater than 3TB in capacity and that are of any SATA standard, whether that's SATA 1.5Gbps, SATA 3Gbps, or SATA 6Gbps. Within those criteria, this dock supports hard drives and solid state drives.For connecting the dock to your computer, you have a bounty of interfaces. The dock features a super-fast USB 3.0 port, one eSATA port, two FireWire 800 ports and one FireWire 400 port. With the USB 3.0 interface, you can transfer data at a blazing maximum rate of 5Gbps. Plus, that interface is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 or 1.1 connections. With all of these ports, you can connect the dock to your Mac or Windows computer and let the data flow!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Complete garbage, stay away. October 20, 2011

By Dan Maloney

I've had four of these fail in the last 6 months. We bought two for our repair shop, they both died within a month. Press the power button, blue light but no drive spin up. I thought it was a little strange that they both died in the same way, so we asked for new ones under warranty. Got the new ones in, and now they are both doing the exact same thing.

That makes 4 products that completely fail in less then a year. I've never seen a product with this poor reliability. Ever. If you buy this, you are completely wasting your money. Stay away.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars YMMV September 7, 2011

By B. Lee

Amazon Verified Purchase

I just got the third one of these I've had: I've have one of the older model (2TB max) for a couple years I think, one of the current model for several months, and just received the second of the current model today. I've used them mostly on macs but also on PCs, the newest one was purchased for use with several Win7 64-bit machines. The oldest, the only problem I've ever had with it is that it doesn't hold 2.5" drives very securely and my cat has managed to "eject" a 2.5" drive from it before by walking around it, probably because of this. They have somewhat addressed this in the current model, a 2.5" drive is somewhat supported by the door and not just the connector. (Lesson learned, I'd also suggest keeping your cat away from any critical backups!) One problem I've had with the two in combination is that if I daisy chain the old one off the new one (Firewire 800) I've had one or the other of the drives unexpectedly vanish after some time. As long as they are plugged in directly this isn't a problem.

The newest dock I received initially appeared to work but was dead within 15 minutes -- after formatting a disk I was transferring data, the drive got unusually warm and the dock stopped responding. After that I tried two different hard drives and two different PCs, USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, no luck -- the Win7 Disk Management tool could sometimes see that something was plugged in (and sometimes not) but it wouldn't recognize the drive, saying that it needed to be initialized, but then reporting that it was unable to initialize it. So back it goes. Amazon won't exchange it, I'm trying to decide if I'll try another one or if I'll try another brand. The reliability on these isn't looking great at the moment, so probably the latter.

Update: got a different brand dock, the hard drive was fine. It seems NewerTech has a reliability problem with this model.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Instant External Hard Drive June 3, 2011

By Jon Kreisler VINE™ VOICE

The Voyager Q is a great docking station. You plug in an internal SATA I, II or III hard drive. It has four different interfaces, so you are sure to have a connection you can use: FireWire 400, FireWire 800, ESATA or USB 3.0. Plug it in and run. It is beautiful. Very speedy too. Also, the drives are hot swappable. You can set up multiple copies of hard drives easily, without having to install and deinstall between each copy. You can also use it for backups, then send the whole drive offsite.
The Voyager Q comes with a power supply and data cables. The only modification I would consider would be a dust cover. That would probably require the addition of a fan, but otherwise the Voyager Q is a great device.
Update: I recently acquired a 4 TB hard drive. The Voyager Q had no problem dealing with this, largest available size (at the moment) hard drive. It would appear the capcity limit is more a function of the operating system than the Voyager Q. (I am currently running Mac OS X 10.8 [ Mountain Lion ] )