Anyone had experience with disk cloning docks? Worth the money or going to be just as much hassle as faffing with a USB caddy?

Would be great if there was one that allowed partition cloning/enlarging, but they seem to work lower level, so I'm guessing the simplest option is to clone the whole disk, delete unwanted partitions and expand into that and the new space afterwards.

That way avoids any potential for Windows to get confused about the system drive/partition too, right?

I've spurned them cos they just seem a bit naked. How much work is it to bung an old HDD into a caddy case & get that bit of protection & (sometimes) natty design?

I like how you drop in a hdd without faffing around with screws and cables. This would be more practical than a case if you needed to do stuff with several drives. Don't really need one myself though.

Protection isn't really a factor for a static feature, and arguably it's more stable than a loose container. I can't remember any good looking caddies, and I think they all tend to need screwing now.

For cloning, having something run at SATA speeds (so 2-4 hours per TB?) without a computer's fan whirring is attractive.

There are some crazy ass priced ones.

There's a product on that page that can duplicate 1 to many USB drives. And priced at over £700. :|

Shurley one can do that with a standard USB hub and a little scripting knowledge.

I dunno, I don't trust some cheapo thing like most of them to clone my partitions properly, I prefer spending some time doing it myself.

Why not? Isn't a low level mirror like the simplest thing and considerably less likely to be screwed up by embedded developers who aren't in the "oh we'll just release and patch it" mindset?

Surely being simple is the worst scenario, as the boredom of coding a simple feature must surely lead to the "ooh let's add some functionality to keep it interesting" mindset.

Simple is only boring if it's long-winded.

That would imply that you're cloning identical drives though, no? Anything more complex like resizing partitions, different alignments etc is a different question.

None of the devices do that?

Well, perhaps some of graphi's thousand pound ones do, but the rest just seem a simple push a button and get a clone.

Even if they did do partition enlargements and stuff, is it actually anything more complicated than maths?