Using JavaScript to capture contents is the easy bit – adding it to the clipboard is a lot more difficult. IE has a JavaScript command built in, other browsers vary. Unfortunately, other browsers (e.g. Firefox) also restrict this ability for security reasons. This is because the ability to write to the clipboard also comes with the ability to read from it as well – quite why this functionality can’t be detached and restrict just the reading I don’t know.

So, using JavaScript is problematic.

Thankfully I’m not the first to come across this problem and a third party script named ZeroClipboard is available. This uses Flash to update the clipboard, which doesn’t have the same security limitations. Of course if you’re viewing from a device that doesn’t support Flash (cough, splutter, iPad, iPhone, cough) then you’re still out of luck. None-the-less this seemed a perfect solution.

Unfortunately, my limited JavaScript skills failed me – I found the program to be over-complex for what I needed and failed to be able to get it to work.

At this point I found an alternative – ZClip uses ZeroClipboard but is controlled via JQuery (which is built into WordPress) and provide a much easier and friendly method of access.

I was now in a position where I had a working plugin. Until I used Admin Bar. That seemed to affect the positioning of the Flash overlay so you had to click slightly above the “Copy to clipboard” button to get it to work.

The customer, though, didn’t have an issue with this and I could only hope that they didn’t have anything else within their theme or plugins that could affect it in this way (I did try contacting the developer of Zclip but got no response).

What really ended it all though was the limited way of capturing text in zclip, which I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. ZClip can capture in 2 ways – from static fields (e.g. the text between a SPAN) or dynamic (e.g. from a field). The first doesn’t capture any formatting, even paragraph breaks – returning everything as one long line of text. The second did, but by capturing the HTML.

The customer wanted the customer to be able to copy to the clipboard long paragraphs of text – neither offered a neat solution to this.

Then I gave up. One day I may return to it – certainly ZeroClipboard will probably allow me to do what I need it to, but I’ll have to get my head around how to first.

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Image courtesy of Michal Koralewski

Somebody once described NTL (now, Virgin Media)  to me as “excellent, until you need any help”, due to their poor support.

When it comes to Streamline.net hosting I wouldn’t even go that far. Their hosting is quite cheap and that’s the only good word I can give them.

The Copy+ website, owned by the software author Stuart, are hosted by Streamline, but I manage the site. As huge profits aren’t made from the Copy+ site we stuck with cheap hosting. We also needed a big bandwidth due to the size of the software being downloaded – it’s often only the lower end of the hosting market that offers this.

Apart from site speed issues it’s been, okay-ish. But when we have needed support it’s not been brilliant. They also have a lot of restrictions – e.g. .htaccess files can only consist of redirects – everything else (including caching) is ignored. I was never able to upgrade phpBB 2 to phpBB 3 due to “out of memory” issues. Instead, I installed it on my own personal site (hosted elsewhere) and transferred over the resulting files and database, which worked.

However, we started being told by customers at the beginning of the year that they had problems signing up for the forum. Over time it got worse and some testing by myself showed that emails sent from the site simply weren’t turning up at their destination.

On the 22^nd March I sent them a support request, asking them to investigate why email was not been sent via my site scripts. I sent them a very basic piece of code using the PHP mail facility to send a mail, so that they had an example (and wouldn’t simply assume it’s my code that’s wrong).

The response was…

To ensure that no spam messages are sent from our network, Streamlinenet filters all outgoing e-mail. These must have a ‘From’ or ‘To’ address that is a domain hosted with Streamlinenet. Any e-mail not fulfilling these criteria is stopped.

For more details, please refer to the link below:

http://www.streamlinesupport.net/index.php?page=show&id=150

We would recommend that you change the destination email on your mailer script to an email address hosted with us.

Ok, so the FROM or TO field needs to be one that is from our domain name – in this case skycopyplus.co.uk. Except the code I sent them had a FROM email from that domain.

I pointed this out.

Can you please provide us the password of the email account support@navpoint.co.uk, so that we can check if it was able to received the test email that we are going to do with the php form on your website?

Quite blatantly they hadn’t looked at the example code as it was using the support@navpoint.co.uk email address as the FROM address, not TO. I pointed this out to them too.

We are already aware with the issue that you are encountering right now, this is because of the SMTP server (authsmtp.streamline.net) intermittent overloading issue. The symptoms of the issue is you are going to encounter delays in sending out emails and sometimes you are going to received bounced back emails.

In order for us to further check the issue, can you please provide us the bounced back emails that you received?

As an alternative solution you can use the outgoing server of your local ISP (internet service provider) or use webmail.domain URL (http://webmail.phit-consultancy.co.uk) in sending out emails, because this is not encountering any issues in sending out emails to any types of email accounts.

Our deepest apologies about this matter. Rest assured that we are working on this issue to solve it soon as possible, as we already received lots of complaints from our customers.

With regards with the issue of the form with your website, we found out that the contact.php and sendmail.php file does not contain any action script to send out emails. Please double check the script of your website and create an action script to send the emails.

Note: We would like to remind you that scripting issue is already beyond of our scope of support.

So, they now wanted bounced emails. Except there weren’t any – they simply didn’t turn up at their destination. They now suggesting this was a problem with my coding too. None-the-less they were now admitting they had a problem with their SMTP server.

My response begins to show my frustration…

We are not recieving any bounced mail responses, so are unable to forward these onto you.

Using an alternative outgoing SMTP server is not a solution for PHP mail, which will use your own SMTP server – as per the code example I sent you.

It would appear that the outgoing mail issue has been going on for weeks – I do not see an open support ticket for this and I am dismayed that you still do not have any ETA for a fix.

At the end of the day I need PHP mail to work. Not to lose mails when I use the correct email structure, as per your demands (i.e. using a FROM or TO mail from our domain).

If you have no intentions to fix this, please let me know now and I will make arrangements to move to another company who can provide the most basic of functions, such as working SMTP.

Their response didn’t help…

We are very sorry, we don’t have the ETA of the sending emails using the main SMTP server which is authsmtp.streamline.net

Please use the alternative SMTP below:

authsmpt1.streamline.net

As I pointed out to them – again – I can’t change the SMTP server that PHP uses without changing the PHP configuration, which they don’t allow me to do.

They responded by ignoring this but instead creating another test program which they told me worked. It worked, but only because the TO address was going to a navpoint.co.uk domain email address. As soon as you change this to go elsewhere it fails.

They then pointed out that they had alternative SMTP servers available. I blew…

Did you read my last message when I clearly explained this?

I am using the PHP mail command, which you cannot configure to use a different SMTP server. That can only be done via the PHP configuration file, which I am unable to change – that is something you have to do.

Have you thought to change this in config.php?

Please stop asking me questions that I keep answering and you ignore.

The response, though, finally told us what we wanted to know…

The destination email on your mailer script (test.php) is still showing as [REMOVED] which is an external email address. Please be reminded that the ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields should be Streamline hosted email addresses else it will be stopped. We have changed this to support@navpoint.co.uk and it now appears to be working fine.

So what they’re telling me is that I have to send mails to the navpoint domain. Which is no good for website contact forms or running a forum which requires users to validate their email address.

Unfortunately, there is no other way around it as these limits exist is so we don’t open ourselves up to abuse.

At this point the Copy+ owner, Stuart, not a web expert in any way, responded. He’d got it, why couldn’t Streamline?

With respect, your statement that BOTH the TO and FROM addresses must be streamline hosted is clearly nonsense. Our own tests (and also direct experience of this mainly working most of the time over many years) have proved this.

The reason for the INTERMITTENT problems we are currently experiencing is it seems, by your own admission, due to an issue with authsmtp.streamline.net.

In Ticket Number: 639751 you kindly provide us with a workaround for this issue – specifically to use authsmtp1.streamline.net.

However the configuration required to do this is part of the PHP server configuration and so outside of our direct control!

We simply ask that you configure our sites at navpoint.co.uk and skycopyplus.co.uk to use the alternative SMTP server of authsmtp1.streamline.net.

They responded back to pointing us to 2 pages on their site which mentions the limitations of their mail system. Except it states the from OR to email fields must have the owners domain and, at no point, makes mention that the TO field must have.

Stuart responded back to ask them – again- if they could configure our site to use their altnerative SMTL server. They responded by saying that they didn’t write scripts for users.

To say we are dealing with IT illiterate imbeciles would be an understatement.

It was now the 31^st March. Between Stuart and I we decided to switch hosts – the hosting was due to finish in August. Unfortunately,  Streamline still had something in store for us when we requested for the hosting not to auto-renew (there is no option in their provided control panel to stop it).

So we can complete the closure please confirm the following:

-That the package you wish to cancel is: skycopyplus.co.uk

- That you have taken all required backups of your website and hosting space, including emails. Please reply to this ticket to confirm this has been done in order that we can proceed to cancellation for you.

- Also if you are able to provide any feedback on why you moved this away would be appreciated

We will close the account on receipt of your confirmation, so please ensure that you complete any backups before replying to this mail, as we are unable to schedule cancellations for a future date.

Please be aware that closure of a hosting account does not entitle you to a refund of any charges already applied to that particular service, including any additional service charges already incurred

In other words, they would close it there and then, with no option to simply cancel the auto-renew. Even this pushed the patience of Stuart.

I am sorry, but that is totally unacceptable. I have paid for my hosting on this account up until the renewal date of 15/08/2011, and I should be entitled to receive the remainder without having to cancel early or run the risk of automatically being charged for a further 2 years at £119.76 as a result. Which appears to be what you are telling me will happen if I fail to cancel exactly on time?

If I wait until the renewal date to cancel (as you seem to imply I need to), how I am supposed to know on what exact date you will have taken the payment, or indeed how long it might take you to respond to my support request so that I can cancel in a timely fashion beforehand to avoid further charges?

I notice that my card payment details that you hold on file have expired. I trust this is sufficient to ensure that I will not be charged on this card? However should you attempt to submit a payment to my card anyway, I will have no hesitation in contacting my card company and demanding a charge back for my card issuer of any monies so taken.

As you happen to ask – one reason for cancelling is that we have been unable to get a reliable service for sending mail via your SMTP servers and a total lack of any coherent responses from your support department regarding this long standing issue on the last 2 tickets we raised. In fact we were totally going round in circles with you as nobody seemed to be reading the history of the ticket before replying. So we are moving our hosting elsewhere where we can get decent support and they do not have ongoing SMTP mail server issues.

But I shall now add to my list of reasons for cancelling your completely inflexible approach to a polite and entirely reasonable request to opt not to renew one of our accounts.

I don’t think a huge amount now needs to be said. The site has been moved to HostPapa who are also cheap and offer unlimited bandwidth. However, their email appears to work and, so far, their support seems a lot, lot better. In time I’ll publish a review about them. Meantime, they hosting is quite a bargain with many features above those that Streamline offer.

My intention for the site is to install WordPress and a brand new forum – a nice bit of stress testing. Next year we have another site to potentially move to a new host so HostPapa may be a possibility there too.

Whatever happens, they surely can’t be worse than Streamline.

A few more “reviews”…

• My legal battle with Streamline.net
• Streamline.net taking money from my account
• streamline.net are crap
• streamline.net are still incompetant

Update (02/02/2012):

Because of the above policy and the fact that the only card details Streamline were aware of was an expired one, Stuart decided to simply let the hosting expire. Once it had he asked them to close his account. The response was…

Further to your request to close the account I am sorry but I am not able to do this whilst there is a payment outstanding on the account.

If you did not wish to renew the account for a further period you would have needed to contact us to request the closure before the renewal date. As you did not do this you would need to clear the payment.

Please note you can use this package with any domain name that you wish to so if there is another website that you need to host we can help you with adding the domain to this package. I would be happy to cover the initial cost of a new .uk or .com domain name (or one of equivalent value).

Should you still wish to proceed with the closure please let us know once you have cleared the payment and we will contact you regarding this.

Basically, they now believe Stuart owes them money for the hosting since his details expired. It took them a week to respond and Stuart’s response was straightforward…

Sorry, but it has taken you over a WEEK to reply to this ticket.  Given that I informed you that I wished to cancel as soon as I became aware that this account was up for renewal (you hadn’t bothered to send me any reminders prior to this), and we then moved our hosting away from your site from that very date, this really isn’t fair at all.

Also I notice from my past dealings with you that it is impossible to inform you in ADVANCE that I wish to cancel, and that my account will be suspended from the date I inform you without any recompense for the lost hosting time.  So really is a total catch 22, and the most atrocious cancellation policy of any company I think I have ever dealt with.  Most require some days notice (for example 1 month) of cancellation with continued service up until that date, which is fair enough.  But it seems you can not even offer that basic courtesy.

In light of this, and as a sign of good will on my part, I am prepared to offer you pro-rata payment of 1 weeks extra hosting – the exact same time it has taken you to reply to this ticket and a whole 5 days more than we actually effectively used.  Please let me know how I can pay that.  Alternatively good luck with collecting the full £143.71 from my cancelled credit card.

Brilliant!

Update (03/02/2012):

A response from Streamline…

I am sorry I am not able to accept anything other than the full outstanding fee.

If you do not wish to clear this then I am not able to close the package at this time.

Summary of Streamline.net hosting

Cheap but not cheerful. They don’t seem to be able to grasp the most basic of customer requirements and have all the technical savvy of my 2 year old. Avoid at all costs.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 27th July 2011.

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Screenshot of DVD Ripper in progress

iToolSoft produce a wide range of ripping and conversion software. And, at the moment, they are giving away their popular DVD Ripper software – it’s 100% clean of viruses, etc, and is restriction free.

It’s a 15.5 MB download and 60.9 MB once installed.

It’s quick to start and uses it’s own GUI, rather than the Windows “standard”. It’s not too different, so isn’t too bothersome (I hate it when software operates totally different to everything else – Apple software is a good example of this). One thing I wasn’t keen on was that the fonts used were not smoothed by ClearType, obviously showing that the GUI was “doing it’s own thing” rather than being handled by Windows (and I’m sure if it was, the download and install sizes would be smaller!).

It’s let down a little by some spelling and grammar mistakes, but its very easy to use. Simple choose the DVD drive that you wish to rip and then either select a profile or create your own. There are profiles for all sorts of devices in different categories, and selecting one of these chooses suitable conversion formats, including resolutions, file types, etc. There’s lots for Apple devices, but when it comes to mobile phones it gets a bit more general, so in my case I’d have to set up my own for my Android phone. Obviously, there are a lot of phones on the market, but catering for some of the more popular, other than Apple, would have been nice.

There’s a preview window, from which you can take screenshots, and a few user-changeable options. But not many. You can also edit video – this is a very simply editor which simply allows you to “clip” parts from it where needed. There are no instructions as part of the installation and the website has some sketchy help, but it’s not a great deal – you’re going to have to work out most of it for yourself.

Star Trek Generations - playback after rip with standard .MOV profile

To test it, I ripped a region 2 copy of Star Trek First Contact to .mov format. Obviously, depending on the various profile options selected, and the length of the film, conversion time will vary. In this case it took around 70 minutes – but this is certainly something you can leave and come back to later. You’ll probably struggle to use the computer at the same time, as it will attempt to use maximum CPU usage (across all cores). There is a “background” option, but this seems to simply send the program to the system tray, rather than reduce CPU use so that the computer can be used for other things (which is what I assumed it was for).

The rip results were very good and I had no complaints about the quality.

I then tried Star Trek Generations – specifically because I have this on Region 1. Windows Media Player refused to play it unless I change my region number (and you can only change this a number of times). However, DVD Ripper had no issues and played and copied it without a problem.

A couple of little foibles – it wasn’t unknown for the time remaining (of the rip) to go into the negative. Also, when you select the option to “check for updates” (assuming because there were no updates) no message was returned, so you wasn’t sure if it had done anything or not.

Please Note

This review was for the FREE version of the iToolSoft DVD Ripper. A commercial version is also available with the same name for approx $26, and includes additional options such as video editing facilities.

Summary of iToolSoft DVD Ripper

Good, solid DVD copier – lots of conversion options, although a few more that weren’t Apple themed would be nice. Lacks decent instructions but it does its job easily and with a minimum of fuss. And, best of all, it’s free.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 26th October 2010.

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Recently, Sky has started upgrading its Sky HD firmware and users have been found that recordings copied with Copy+ are not always playing back properly. At first, people started contacting Sky, thinking it was their firmware. However, they have now posted an official response.

1Tb Sky+HD Issues – Update 13/10/2010 – 19:00

Investigations continue into the issues reported by a minority of Sky+HD 1Tb customers.

We now understand the root cause of an issue with Copy+ software used on the set top box prior to the latest software update that can cause an error in the filesystem which is critical to the new software, causing corruption to planner and recorded content. We are aware that many of the issues reported by customers are not caused by Copy+ but customers who have used Copy+ will need to perform a full system reset. We regret that some of our customers are suffering from this, but reiterate that Copy+ is not a Sky product and is not supported or endorsed by us.

Further updates will be provided as the investigations continue.

Because of this, Stuart has put out an official statement.

We would like to sincerely apologise to all of our users with “1TB” boxes, and also to Sky, for the inconvenience caused by this issue, which does indeed appear t be caused by a filesystem discrepancy introduced by Copy+.

We appreciate that Sky can not be responsible for testing for compatibility with a third party application such as Copy+, but then equally it is impossible for us to test against future Sky software releases as we have no advance knowledge of what they may contain. It is an unfortunate situation for all concerned.

We fully accept that the best course of action for effected users would be to perform a Full System Reset as suggested by Sky. However we accept that some users my have recordings which they do not wish to lose, and so wish to offer a possible, if somewhat more technical, alternative.

To that end we are continuing to investigate and believe we are close to developing an application to fix the inconsistencies in pre and post update recordings so that they no longer risk overwriting each other. Please note that any such “fix” will not be able to recover already lost or damaged content, however it will prevent further losses in the future. Any such fix, as with using Copy+ in the first place, would of course be entirely at the users own risk. While we finalise testing this tool, users can minimise the risk of overwriting further recordings, by avoiding making new recordings or deleting content. However we fully understand if users would prefer to follow Sky’s advice and regrettably have to FSR their system.

Once again we would like to sincerely apologise to all our users effected by this unfortunate incident and the subsequent loss of recordings.

I’ve updated our Twitter feed and posted a link to the above statement of Stuarts on the download page.

I have regularly contact with Alex Lane from What Satellite magazine, so made him aware. Today, they have posted their own news story (currently, gulp, their leading news story). I even get a name check, although incorrectly.

All of this puts Copy+ into the spotlight a little.

All Stuart can do now is to try and understand (if he can) what’s caused this. The important thing to note is that this issue doesn’t occur on the old firmware. None-the-less, new recordings made on the new firmware don’t have an issue.

To me, and this is just my personal opinion, this suggests a change in the Sky firmware. A friend has suggested that maybe Sky have done this to “nobble” Copy+, but I think that’s overly cynical – this will have given Sky bad press as much as Copy+.

Maybe Stuart will find a way to correct for the issue on old recordings. At the very least we need to correct for whatever it is for new usage.

But Alex made a very good point…

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First up, my Java book has turned up, so I intend to start learning that. Once learnt, I’ll then be ordering another book this time for how to create Android Apps using my previously learnt Java skills.

I also still have my Visual Basic book to get through as well (do you think I could do both at the same time or would that get confusing?).

I’ve recently launched an initial website for a new product named navPOInt – a SatNav POI editor for Audi/VW owners. A video is being produced of it in action, which I will then be embedding on the site. Once the software development for this is complete (which I’m not doing, I should add) I’ll then need to build a complete site, complete with instructions, forums and the usual gubbins.

I also have planned changes to make to this site and the Copy+ site.

I’m also still working on my WordPress plugins. My caching function (as used by a number of my plugins) is being completely re-written, I have some ideas for new plugins and I’m in the process of updating a number of the existing ones.

First up, though, is an update to Simple Social Bookmarks to add Google Buzz¹.

And somewhere in all of that I need to squeeze in some blogs about recommended Android Apps, a review of the most popular Android Twitter Apps and a post of recommended HTC Hero accessories.

1. which I’m underwhelmed with. Even the ability to share links on Buzz is being done via a “back door” method as Google hasn’t provided the facility to do it.

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Now, let me just state for the record that I welcome requests for reviews. The problem here is my bar for an acceptable quality level for those contacting me, stating to be a professional organisation. Having said that, they are now adding their contact details, including address, at the bottom of their emails which is a start.

Anyway, their new email. It gets off badly..

Thank you very much for reviewing on our Software.

I don’t think I have.

We are pleased to inform you that a good news.

Whatever made me think originally that they might be a foreign company?

The mysterious Sophia (mysterious because I don’t believe that is her name) goes on to tell me that one of their commercial products is available for free for the rest of the month. They then go on to provide me with a URL to use and tell me I can promote this on my site. Great. But then they finish with…

Please kindly let me know if you are interested in this offer. We would be more than happy to discuss with you further about this.

Oh. Ok. I have to tell them first? Or not. What do I need to discuss?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I can promote this. I’ve not reviewed the product, but there’s lot of “awards” for it on the page – just make sure you check them out first¹.

So, here’s the details…

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum is a professional DVD ripping software tool which could backup your DVD video to your personal PC or put into your portable devices. It offers fast ripping speed, stable ripping process and best video/audio quality.

Use this link to get it for free – no registration is required. The offer lasts until September 30th.

1. I’m not singling out this company, you should obviously do this for any product

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Next month, they’ll be talking about +Extract.

All of which is great publicity for this fantastic bit of software.

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The author wasn’t planning on any further releases but changed his mind so that it could support drives over 500GB in size (which is possible, thanks to Copy+). And, whilst he was at it, he fixed some bugs, made some performance enhancements and gave the GUI a spruce-up.

Not bad for free software… but please donate if you like it.

This is a guest review by Stuart McConnachie from the Copy+ site. The product was kindly provided by Storage Depot, a small and friendly company, established in 2002, which specialises in digital storage.

Well I’ve been using it for all my day-to-day Copy+ operations as well as development and support activities for quite some weeks now, and can truly say it is a faultless piece of kit. Here’s what you get for your money.

Hard Drive Caddy

Obviously the box contains the docking station itself, which is a sleek black unit that won’t look out of place on your desktop. There are two power switches on the front of the unit for controlling the two drives, essential for this kind of setup as you don’t want to be hot plugging drives in and out of the cradle while they are still spinning! On the back of the unit are the input for power from the supplied power “brick”, a single USB B style socket and two ESATA ports clearly labelled – one for each drive dock. Also included in the box is a single standard USB A-B connector (a nice touch in the days where printer manufacturers seem to be omitting USB cables as if they were some kind of “optional” extra) and not one but two ESATA cables. Also Storage Depot included a UK mains cable to replace the US two-prong version that comes in the box as standard. So no excuse to go trying to plug it into your bathroom shaver socket as I saw one dumb user post to a forum recently

So, all in all the unit was very easy to set up and just plugging into my PC the Windows XP USB mass storage drivers automatically detected the new hardware and I was up and running in seconds. No tools required, just as the box packaging suggests. Then it’s just a case of plugging in a SATA drive – the unit takes both 3.5” desktop variants such as used in Sky+HD or the smaller 2.5” laptop drives without modification – and powering on with the appropriate power switch on the front. The drive then spins up and is recognised by Windows just like with any other USB cradle/caddy.

I started out by performing a disk-to-disk copy using both ports of the cradle, as this is the most likely potential use for this kit when upgrading a Sky+HD box from the OEM 300GB drive. As a source disk I used a 300GB Samsung drive that had been in use in my Sky+ box for quite some time and was about 80% full. As such the file system was relatively fragmented, and so a good representative test of the kind of source disk most people would be copying. As the destination drive I choose a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar drive – again not an uncommon choice for HD upgraders. Copy+ fired up and recognised both drives straight off, and it was a simple matter of selecting source and destination and clicking the Copy button.

The whole copy process took about 4 hours, which was a little longer than I was expecting. However this is probably down to both drives being on the same USB port and all the data for both reads and writes has to travel down the same 480Mb/s USB 2.0 link to the cradle. Unfortunately I don’t have access to a PC with ESATA ports, and so was unable to test this connection method – however I expect that would be significantly faster with a combined throughput of 3Gb/s. I hope to be able to test the device in this configuration at some point and report back.

Once the copy had finished I used the Windows task bar Remove Hardware icon to safely disconnect both drives. I was please to hear that at this point the caddy powered down both drives obviously parking the heads on each. This is something you don’t normally see with regular USB caddies – and so it’s a nice touch with this unit given its quick plug feature. The power light on the front remained eliminated however, and after powering off the drives I removed them from the cradle and returned the 1TB to the Sky box. I’m sure you could probably remove the drives without powering off, as they had already spun down – However it seems sensible to remove the power from the electronics first!

Both the caddy and Copy+ had performed flawlessly and all my recorded programs and series links were present on the Sky+ box – So I have absolutely no qualms in certifying this thoroughly excellent piece of kit as fully Copy+ compatible

As I mentioned earlier, I has also used the cradle for my day-to-day Copy+ support and development activities, so it’s had a very good workout in addition to drive copying duties. During this time I also noticed that the docking station will auto-power down drives to standby if they aren’t used for an extended period of time (e.g. 5 minutes or so). Again that’s a feature you don’t see on a large number of aftermarket enclosures. Given the open drive nature of this enclosure that’s a very useful feature that means the unit would be totally silent when not in use as well as environmentally friendly. So if you plan on using the cradle as an occasional desktop backup solution, I’d suggest it would be eminently suited to that job as well.

Storage Depot have kindly offered a 10% discount on all hard drive cradles – simply follow this link to those products which are included.

At “Checkout” you should find a button named “Show Discounts & Extras”. Press this and a box will appear allowing you to enter a discount code. Type in “copyplus” (without the quotes). It’s not case sensitive.

Summary of Dual Drive SATA Docking Station

The SI-7928SUSJ Dual SATA Docking Station a very well thought-out and specified piece of kit that I would have no hesitation in recommending to any Sky+HD upgrader – or indeed PC user who requires a hot plug SATA solution. I’ve certainly found it invaluable, as my work with Copy+ often requires swapping drives in and out of my various caddies – and this little unit has saved a lot of time and hassle. I just wish there was a similar unit of PATA drives!

Reviewed by David Artiss on 5th January 2009.

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So, if a site was linking to an erroneously spelt page then you could create a redirect for this to the correct page – ensuring you still get the visitors to the appropriate page.

BMTG was okay (apart from a misspelling on my own blog, so I was able to correct that) as was Copy+. However, I can see the advantage of this tool and will be keeping an eye on it in future.

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