Icy Dock MB452 Review - A testing we will go
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So here I am. The unit is all assembled, it's plugged into the PC, I even see Windows telling me I have a new mass storage device attached. I go into Windows Explorer to find the drive, and it isn’t there. What? I try again. I unplug the USB cable and turn off the unit. I plug the USB cable back in, and turn the unit back on. Once again, Windows recognizes that I’ve attached a new device, but I don’t see it in Windows Explorer. What gives?
Then it dawns on me. It’s a new, unformatted drive. Windows isn’t going to show it until I’ve formatted it. To do this, I need to go into the computer management section of the control panel. When I get in there, I see this:
There, labeled as Disk 1, is my external drive. It’s listed as “Not initialized.” So I right-click and select “Initialize.” Now the computer is happy to see it. But it's still unformatted, so I right click on the part with the grey lines, and choose to create a partition. I create a primary partition using NTFS, and tell it to format it for me.
When it finished, I went into Windows Explorer and guess what I saw?
And there it is! Showing as drive ‘E’ is the drive I labeled ‘ICY DOCK.’
For the benchmarking, I used HD Tach by Simpli Software. Our test machine is a P4 3.25 GHz, with 1GB of Dual Channel ram. The MB452 was plugged into one of the USB 2.0 slots in the back of the machine. I ran two tests, 8mb and 32mb. Here are the results.
As you can see, the speeds are pretty similar, and really not that impressive at all. I’m sure using the e-SATA we would see a vast improvement, but until e-SATA is more commonly available, most users will be using USB. This is especially true if they are using the Icy Dock MB452 on more than one machine (as a common drive for a desktop and laptop, for example).
Next: Conclusions >>
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