PC cases offer a large number of HDD trays nowadays allowing people to mount and use several drives without ever having to worry about storage capacity. Still for professionals and even enthusiasts there's no such thing as sufficient storage space and because of that external HDD enclosures offer a good way to expand drive capacity without much hassle. HDD enclosures may not be hard to use and usually it doesn't take long to mount a drive inside but for people looking for the easiest and fastest possible way to use 3.5/2.5" drives nothing beats the simplicity of a HDD/SSD docking station. Docking stations however have evolved quite a bit over the years so dual bay models are not only the easiest way to access two 3.5/2.5" drives but also to clone one onto another and the CR-H236 by CineRAID which we have here with us today is one such model.

With more than 20+ years of experience in the data storage industry, we know storage. Our parent company Tekram USA was founded in 1990 and was recognized as one of the most influential and famous storage solution providers and manufacturer in Taiwan, when SCSI and cache controller cards were the latest storage controllers. In fact, Tekram was the first company to develop caching disk controllers for the VL-Bus , greatly enhancing system performance back then. Tekram innovations like its bus-mastering enhanced IDE chip, S1040 SCSI controller ASIC have given us the structure and background to always keep advancing with the latest storage developments. During the transition between SCSI and SATA/SAS, Areca Technologies was founded in 1999 with a commitment for the research and development of newer disk array technologies. Using the existing knowledge and experience from Tekram, Areca has been able to continue delivering storage innovations with their own custom ASIC and released the first RAID 6 controller to hit the market. Today, Tekram USA created a division called CineRAID, strategically partnered with Areca Technologies in order to provide creative professionals a broad range of high performance, reliable and low cost disk array solution fully optimized for digital content and streaming media applications.

CineRAID is a name we've all heard in the past but since it's aimed towards the USA market mostly up to date we never had the opportunity to cooperate with them. The good news is that their product line includes several storage related models manufactured not only from them but also from other companies under Tekram some of which are quite famous around the globe. Getting back to the CR-H236 this is a compact USB 3.0 hot-swap dual bay docking station that features separate power buttons for each drive, SATA III ports (most similar models still feature SATA II) and fully supports UASP under Windows 8/8.1/10 for the best possible read & write performance. You can also use the CR-H236 to easily clone drives up to 6TB in capacity (the target drive always needs to be at least the same capacity as the source) just by pressing a single button. On paper the CR-H236 seems to have it all but is that really the case?