Sharkoon’s Quickport is an elegant docking station for Serial-ATA drives, letting you attach them without having to open your PC. The Quickport is equipped with a USB interface, making it universally usable. But is that all?

You can never have enough hard disk space. After all, disks just fill up far too quickly these days, inevitably forcing you to buy a new drive. The side effect of this strategy is that you’ll sound find yourself the master of a good sized collection of magnetic storage media – especially if you’re a photographer, work with lots of video or simply enjoy recording TV shows to your computer.

The trouble is that PCs are equipped with only a limited number of connection options. Once all of the internal interfaces are in use, you have to use one of the external ones. Until now, this required a USB or Firewire adapter or even an external HDD enclosure. All of these solutions are comparatively cumbersome to use.

Installing the HDDs in your computer’s case when switching between different disks means you’ll always need to use a screwdriver. The steps of this procedure: open the case, find the connectors, arrange the cables, attach them, install the medium, close the case. If you have to do this frequently, you’ll soon begin to favour the “convertible” version – you’ll either use your case “with the top down” (i.e. open), or rout the cables outside so you can attach the drives more quickly.

The Serial ATA specification allows for a hard drive to be connected to a running PC thanks to a feature called Hot Plug ’n’ Play. In practice, more often than not the end result is that your PC will crash, losing your data as it reboots itself. Obviously, this is not a viable solution.

This is where Sharkoon comes in with its Quickport. This docking station is designed to rest stably and firmly on your desk. All you have to do is insert the drive into the slot on the top of the device, saving you all of the hassle with running cables. Only the Quickport itself needs to be connected to the PC via USB cable. Just seconds after the docking station is switched on, the freshly created USB drive will show up in your system – no drivers needed.