Addonics Technologies has announced the US$45 Mini HDD Duplicator Station (http://tinyurl.com/a2muwqp), a compact storage device about the size of a desktop computer power supply.

The storage device is designed to be used as an 1:1 HDD/SSD duplicator or as a USB 3.0 docking device for up to two SATA hard drives. It’s a tool for transferring data between different types of hard drives and flash memory cards, as well as for cloning hard drives or making back up hard drives.

When used as a duplicator, you simply insert the master hard drive into the SOURCE slot and the destination drive into the TARGET slot. You then press the CLONE button and the duplication process starts automatically. All the content, including boot sector and partition table on the master drive, will be copied onto the destination drive sector by sector.

The SOURCE and the TARGET drive slots are designed to accommodate standard 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA hard drives, SSDs, or the Addonics family of 2.5-inch flash drives.

If used as an USB 3.0 docking station, the two drives in the SOURCE and TARGET drive slots can be connected to any computer via the USB 3.0 port or the USB 2.0 port.

The drives will appear as two individual drives to the computer. Each drive can be removed and a new drive can be added to the drive slot without the need to restart the computer, similar to using a VHS cassette. There is also a BackUp button that works in unison with the bundled back-up software to make a copy of all your important data onto one of the two hard drives installed in this docking station.