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Message from Sponsor
We now had 3 colors available on the market (silver , black and mirror black).
 
For next month we will have "Buy MB559 and Get free tray" promotion program on our web site and major online store such as newegg...etc (6/1/07 ~ 6/30/07)
Visit our product page for more exciting products.
You can pick up MB559 at NewEgg.
Introduction
We are proud to
present the Icy Dock review for your reading pleasure. First of all, I
would like to thank Icy Dock for providing this product for review. What
we have here is a perfect product for any average or advanced computer
user. Let’s face it - the price of hard drives has been reduced to the
point that you will never have to erase anything due to lack of space on
your hard drive. For all hyper-advanced users such as application
developers and hard core data users, this product might be for you too.
The MB559 is an external enclosure that fits standard 3.5" sata drives. For this review I have used a Western
Digital 500 gig sata drive for testing
purposes.
About the
Product
The MB559 enclosure
comes with eSATA + USB 2.0 combo interface
combo. It also has a slick aluminum body and a fanless
cooling design. The MB559 can be mounted vertically or horizontally
depending on the need. What I thought was a really cool
feature are the feet that can be retracted with a push of a
button. The MB559 is also has the ability to swap drives and could be
easily maintained just by removing the drive tray.
Closer look
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Front shot
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Front shot
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The package came in a
small box just big enough to fit the unit. When I took the MB559 out I
quickly realized the box which surrounded it was made of plastic. Paying close
attention to the exterior of the unit, I found a thin coat of plastic
around the whole unit.
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Side box shot
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Side box
shot
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From both sides of
the box you can see a small sticker seal with Icy Dock logos. The whole
package was very small and looked just right for an average external hard
drive enclosure. Lets open the beast up. :)
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Side box shot
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Opened
box
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Opening the box was
very easy and convenient. The whole package contained the actual unit and
accessories.
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Accessories and MB559
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MB559 Out of the box
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Reverse
side
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When handling the
MB559 I immediately felt this was a high quality product. The slickness
of this particular unit is eye-opening.
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Rear access panel
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Power and lock
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Retractable
feet
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The rear panel is
very neat and has all the right ports. On the back we have the Off and On
switches, eSATA connector, USB 2.0 connector, power, lock hole and a button for the retractable
feet.
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Front access panel
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Front access panel close up
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Retractable
feet in action
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From the front, I
found a very stylish removable tray mechanism. The actual tray handle is
made out of light aluminum. I took some close-up shots just to show the
retractable llegs and side comparison.
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Feet close up
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Side comparison
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Removing
the front tray
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Tray out
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Inside MB559
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Ventilation
holes
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One press on the
release lever and the hard drive bay was easily removed. Everything inside
the case was pretty self-explanatory. All I saw was one board with SATA
connectors. The ventilation holes on the side of the
case was a must! This case doesn't use any fans to redistribute
the air for circulation.
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Rubber accessory
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Accessories
box
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On the back of the
case there is a rubber strip so that the MB559 could be used lying down
on the flat side. Very good idea considering the case would otherwise slide
left and right. The accessories box was very well constructed; the
following was what was inside:
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Accessories and manual
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Western Digital installed
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Testing
rig and MB559
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The accessories box
had an SATA cable extender, USB cable (a to b),
power supply adapter, power cord, an SATA cable and instruction manual.
For this review I used a WD 500 gig hard drive for testing. The testing
rig was an ECS P4M800PRO-M main board, 2 WD 250 gig hard drives in Raid
0, 1 WD 500 gig hard drive on internal channel and 1 WD 500 gig drive in
the Icy Dock MB559. The RAM I used was Patriot Ram, DDR 3200.
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Lights on :)
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Testing
Ok, so we looked at
the physical shape of the MB559 and all of its cool features. It’s time to take a look at the actual testing
performance of this product. In this review I used HD Tach
and Sandra. Unfortunately the P4800PRO-M doesn't support eSATA so the testing was done in an SATA mode with
150 mb/s maxed speed.
The first test was
done in HD Tach by running an 8mb sequential
read test. The test was administered against the two identical hard
drives but one on the internal SATA channel and the other one in MB559.
HD Tach 8 mb Sequential Read test
The blue-line graph
represents the Internal WD 500 where the red-line graph represents a
drive inside of the enclosure. The max speed we see here is 109.8 mb/s on the internal
channel and 109.5 mb/s on the MB559. I was very
impressed with these results.
The second test was
the 32 mb version of the HD Tach
Sequential Read test. The results were very impressive as the results previous.
HD Tach 32 mb Sequential Read test
Again the speeds were
very close to each other. This means that there is literally barely any
difference between the drive on the internal sata
channel and the sata channel through the MB559.
Great! I am also pretty sure I could run Raided drives with Icy Dock at
the main drives for OS :)
My next test was to see
how the drive would actually perform in comparison to other external
drives out there. This time I used a USB cable which was supplied with the
MB559 to conduct the test.
Sandra Removable Storage comparison chart
With the results
shown above I think it’s safe to say that performance-wise, the MB559
competes very well among external storages such as Maxtor and SanDisk.
Conclusion
The MB559 is an
excellent product to have handy if you are on the move or need to
transport some data. Icy Dock did a pretty good job making this unit
slick and an eye candy product. The easy removable drive tray and ability
to interchange the drives is a great idea and could be highly beneficial
when large amounts of data need to be either stored or transferred. The
performance factor of this particular unit proved to us that the MB559
onboard controller board keeps up with the speed of the motherboard just
as good as the SATA controller channel on the actual motherboard. This
unit has earned a perfect 10/10 from UMLan :)
Great product!
Some pros we
found:
Light weight
Slick and very
stylish
Easy hard drive
removable tray
eSATA capable
Some Cons we
found:
No cooling fans
Power supply could be
build in
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