Icy Dock MB452 Review - Hook me up
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There are many hard drive enclosures on the market, but one of the things that really sets this unit above the competition is the ability to use either USB or e-SATA to hook up to your computer. As the specifications read, USB 2.0 would yield a data transfer rate of 480 megabytes per second, whereas when using e-SATA that is increased to 3 gigabytes per second. For those of you looking for quick access to your external drive, e-SATA is definitely the way to go. Unfortunately, since it’s a newer technology, you will not find many machines with an e-SATA port on them.
Since we don’t have a machine with e-SATA, and were unable to get an e-SATA expansion card on short notice, we used the USB interface for our testing purposes. It would have been nice if Icy Dock would have included an e-SATA adapter, which allows you to utilize an internal SATA connection as an e-SATA. Here’s a shot of the back of the MB452.
From the above picture, you can see that everything is clearly labeled and easy to get to. The most important thing on the back of this unit is the selection switch. You must move it to the correct setting if you want your machine to recognize the unit when you plug it in.
I plugged in the power cable, and using the included USB cable plugged the unit into my machine. To my surprise, nothing happened. No lights turned on, no noises, no windows on the screen. Nothing at all.
A quick trip to the instruction sheet taught me a little more about the key lock. It seems that the key lock isn’t there JUST to keep people from stealing the tray out of the enclosure. It has three settings.
- Setting 1 (with the key vertical) means the unit is powered off, and the drive tray is unlocked. The drive tray can be released only when the key is in this position.
- Setting 2 (with the key at a 45 degree angle) means that the drive tray is locked, but the unit is powered down. No one can remove the tray, nor can they access data on the drive.
- Setting 3 (with the key horizontal) means that the drive tray is locked, and the unit is powered on.
Silly me! I needed to turn it on!
So there it is, on my desk and turned on. The green power light on the bottom indicates the power is on, while the amber one on top indicates drive activity.
Okay, it's set up and connected to the computer, so let’s test it out.
Next: A testing we will go >>
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