ICY DOCK MB559UEA-1S
reviewed by Wayne LeFevre, November 2006
Icy Dock USA 147 Puente Ave. City of Industry, CA 91746 626.956.8800 626.956.8811 Released: October 2006 $70 USD, $78 CND, £37 GBP, €55 Euro Requirements: Mac OS 9 or newer. Availability: Newegg, Firewire Depot Strengths: Compact, lightweight aluminum. SATA 3.5” Hot Swappable Hard drive enclosure. Fairly easy hard drive installation. Hard drive holding tray compatible with other ICY DOCK products. Can stack or stand on it’s side, button activates side feet to open. Built in security slot for security cable kit. No fan, fairly quiet operation. Power button. “Luminous mini white activity L.E.D.” bright enough to read by. Weaknesses: “Luminous mini white activity L.E.D.” bright enough to read by. Part plastic on side with heat vents. Allows a little more noise to be heard from hard drive. (Of course, you supply your own hard drive, so that can be compensated for by purchasing a quieter drive.) |
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Ease of Installation
Comes with all cables and accessories (F/W 6 pin to 6 pin cable, USB 2.0 cable, power brick and power cable., screws). Simply use 4 screws to attach to tray, slide into enclosure, hook the locking bracket and snap closed. Mac immediately recognized drive and I was off and running.
Manufacturer Interaction
Worked as advertised first time. Literally off and running in 5 minutes time. No need to call or e-mail support for help.
Instructions
Instructions for use and installation included in pamphlet form. Easy to follow.
Interaction
No training needed. Just plug and play, unless you wanted to set up anything special such as partitions.
Effectiveness
Stayed cool after an hours worth of transferring files and playing movies. Heat dissipation seems to work relatively well.
Recommendation
This is the second ICY DOCK enclosure that I have
reviewed, and this is the one I would consider purchasing as a second external
hard disk. Not that the shuttle wasn’t a fantastic enclosure, just that this
one is for a SATA II 3.5” disk, and I have a Mac Mini that desperately needs
more room. This enclosure certainly didn’t disappoint with the packaging,
either. So much so that I even took a picture of it before opening it. Check it
out.
You get to see exactly what you are purchasing, it isn’t hiding inside an obscure box. I can’t tell you how cool I think all of ICY DOCK packages are.
There are two versions of this enclosure. This one has FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. The MB559US-1S is an eSATA / USB 2.0 and it includes an eSATA bracket. Both are fanless with aluminum bodies and a side with white plastic vents. The bracket is also made of aluminum and includes these spring tabs called Anti-Shank Technology that keeps the HDD secure and shock free. The enclosure used the latest OXUF924DSA chipset from Oxford providing a solid, quick interface with the computer. I could go into how fast the F/W drive is and the like, unfortunately this being just the enclosure, it all depends on your drive. I can tell you that with a WD 250G 7200 RPM HDD, drive Sequential average read speed was 40.6 MB/s for the FireWire, and 35 MB/s for the USB. Not too shabby! (Burst speed was a bit higher by about 3 MB/s.) Random access was 13.6 ms.
ICY DOCK has several different multi drive external and internal racks that is compatible with the drive tray, so one could technically pull a drive hot out of a multi rack, and place in this enclosure for transporting and sharing. ICY DOCK is also planning on selling just the drive trays separately in November.
ICY DOCK has really been impressing me with their offerings. They’ve got that attention to detail that I love so much. How many other companies do you know that put their product on display before you even open the package? If your looking to expand your desktop, and already have a SATA drive, or planning on purchasing one of your size choice, you really can’t go wrong with the ICY DOCK.
