The Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Pro LAN started off promising so much – the flexibility and connectivity of a hot-swappable NAS enclosure with the portability and low cost of a stand alone external disk drive. Unfortunately it rather seems that Sharkoon have missed a trick here by not specifying gigabit LAN for the device and settling on the cheaper 10/100Mbit standard. As already stated on page 2 of this review the Features and Specifications from Sharkoon's website do make mention of this – however it is conspicuously lacking on the actual packaging itself so I'll revise my final comment at the bottom of page 3 Packaging... 'Everything is NOT as it should be'.

Whilst testing the unit we also tried the front USB and Card Reader slots since one of the possible benefits of the LAN connectivity was to be able to share attached devices without having to have set them up as shares within Windows and leave the attached PC running for others on the LAN to access them. These slots are available when the device is connected through any of the available interfaces, but alas their throughput would be limited to that of the chosen interface, which realistically means you should choose to use either the USB or eSATA interfaces only, which in turn means we are back to setting up those shares in Windows... another wasted opportunity due to the non-gigabit LAN we feel.

Whilst there is no doubt that when in eSATA mode this is a very useful device allowing users to hot-swap between multiple hard drives and access content almost as fast as if the drives were internally mounted but without any of the hassle of going inside your PC every time you wanted to change drive, it is spoiled by the lack of high speed LAN and we therefore must consider if this device is really worth having over it's lesser sibling the 'SATA QuickPort Pro' which has everything this does except for the LAN and costs about £10 less...

We'll leave you to decide that one for yourselves!

Pros
• Adequate USB 2.0 performance
• Excellent eSATA performance
• 2.5” and 3.5” SATA HDD compatibility with Hot Swap
• Convenient eject button and status LED's
• Sturdy build quality
• Front connectors available through any interfaces

Cons
• Lack of gigabit LAN
• Cost