Portable Drive Duplicator PC?

[CKRZ]

Twice a year or so I need to go to some family member or friend's house and perform some kind of drive rescue, partition process or SSD migration.  Usually I find that their own PC doesn't have enough SATA ports, cables, power etc. in order to do the migration easily and I end up taking their equipment or drives back home with me and plug them into my own PC tower where do I have the room, but this involves yanking my PC out of its niche and opening it up, and generally making it unusable for my own needs during the process.

 

What I would like to do is find or build a very small, portable drive duplicator PC that doesn't have to rely on USB 2 or 3 bottlenecks.

 

Does anyone have some suggestions on equipment?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

[Electronics Wizardy]

Hotswap bays for your case?

 

Or usb drives are fine normally, they won't limit the speed of hdds, and get close to the limit of a sata drive.

[CKRZ]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Hotswap bays for your case?

 

Or usb drives are fine normally, they won't limit the speed of hdds, and get close to the limit of a sata drive.

I work with USB 2 and 3 drives at work all the time and it's my experience that they are much slower than SATA connections (although I'm usually doing file-based robocopy operations on them and not copying whole partitions.)

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, CKRZ said:

I work with USB 2 and 3 drives at work all the time and it's my experience that they are much slower than SATA connections (although I'm usually doing file-based robocopy operations on them and not copying whole partitions.)

 

With a hdd, your will be limited by the drive, not the interface, esp in block level coones.

 

But why not do a sata hot swap in your case?

[CKRZ]

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

With a hdd, your will be limited by the drive, not the interface, esp in block level coones.

 

But why not do a sata hot swap in your case?

The hotswap idea is certainly an option. To be honest I haven't looked at hotswap bays since the original 5 1/4" ones first appeared in beige plastic with big briefcase handles, so I haven't got a clue if there's anything out there that would be more "portable".

 

When I first thought about this, I was envisioning perhaps one of those "NUC" PCs about the size of an Apple TV and some kind of eSATA-based external dock.

 

Hang on, I just found this https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01MTLMTL0/ref=dp_cerb_3  and although it's USB 3, it might do well enough for what I want.

[Bombastinator]

Pi 4 or an older higher end pi? (Mostly for the i/o.  You don’t need the cpu performance) Can you deal with Linux?  You can run em off a battery.  They’re the size of a pack of smokes.