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I have set up an external hard drive dock with a static hot-swap dock for backups and emergencies (Is the house on fire? Grab the hdd on the way out!). It is powered on manually, but that's a pain and I suspect if left to my own devices I will leave it always powered on.

I'm considering hooking it up to a smart (not in the IOT sense) power bar with a master outlet and several slave outlets that don't provide power unless the master is on, with the master outlet being the PC. This will auto shutoff the dock when the computer powers down.

Based on my crude understanding of the way write buffers work, but this particular dock has two ports and a "clone" button (for cloning drives) that works offline; from this I assume it's inherently different than a standard USB drive. Is there any testing I can do to verify if it can be powered down at the same time as the PC, or if I need to give it a minute to clear it's buffers?

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After experimenting with this setup, I cannot emphatically enough suggest that no one attempt this. Not only did the dock fail (apparently it does have some software of it's own, fortunately it was relatively inexpensive) but the device actually shut down my computer as well (I am 100% sure the PC was on the "master" outlet) during boot-up, which corrupted the bios. The only reason I'm not deleting this question is to leave it as a warning to others -- devices like this on are the devil, and should be avoided with the same fervor which one avoids the fires of hell.

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