| Icy Dock MB122SKGF-1B and MB722SKGF-B Drive Enclosures
|
Installation (continued):
The trays slide right into its enclosure, but the MB722 was a tighter fit. The MB122 was easily moved in and out without any hiccups, while the MB722 took a little more force to be moved in and out. I also like the MB122's handle a little more. It feels a little more durable than the MB722 and I never got the feeling it was close to snapping. Removing the tray from the MB722 isn't something I would want to do too often; the handle felt like it was going to snap a few times (possibly the enclosure being squeezed into the 5.25" bay was the cause).
With the system powered on here are the enclosures all lit up. They both blink a lot when being accessed, along with the icon on the LCD screen that spins. The MB722's face plate has a set of lights that is kind of crazy (enlarging the below right image shows some animation).
 
Testing:
The previously reviewed Icy Dock External USB enclosure (MB452UK) is an IDE drive but could not be swapped into the MB722 even though the tray's connections were the same. The drive could not be read at all. The SATA version of the MB452 (MB452MK) can be swapped with the MB122 which is a cool thing if you need to take your hard drive to any other computer with a USB connection. It would be very cool for all of these enclosures to use a common interface so IDE can be hot-swapped with a SATA enclosure. Here is an animation of how to swap a drive from the MB452 to a MB122.
I also tested the RAID capability of these enclosures. The motherboard I have is a DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR which has RAID 0 and RAID 1. I installed two of the Hitachi 80GB SATA II drives into each enclosure and booted up my operating system which was housed on these RAID drives. Here are two screenshots from the RAID-0 array with no enclosures, and the RAID-0 array using the two Icy Dock enclosures. They are pretty close, so I do not think the enclosures had anything to do with a very slight decrease in performance. Even though the specs on the Icy Dock website and on the packages say they support SATA I speed of 150MB/Sec, they are clearly capable of SATA II 300MB/Sec speeds. (No enclosure on left / Icy Dock enclosures on the right).
 
Since the drives are identical, I took a note of the temperatures. The MB122 was at 31 Celsius while the MB722 was at 32 Celsius. I would expect the larger MB722 to have a lower temperature with the increased airflow in the tray.
|
|
|
|
