Overclocker Cafe - Icy Dock MB454 Drive Enclosure Review

Icy Dock MB45x Multi HDD Bay

Manufacturer: Icy Dock
Supplied by: Icy Dock
MSRP: Three Bay - $99, Four Bay - $139, Five Bay - $149

by Dean Barker (9/30/2006)

Introduction

Icy Dock has been making hard drive enclosures for years now and has proven their quality and usefulness again and again in that time. Anyone who has a need to transfer drives or data on a large scale basis knows immediately what I mean. Aside from general portability, Icy Dock has added a few more tasty features to their newest line of SATA drive enclosures. This newest line, the MB45x series, comes in three models, the MB453 with a three drive capacity, the MB454 sporting four drive capacity and the MB545 with a five 3.5" drive capacity. Today we take some time out with Icy Dock's MB454 Drive Enclosure to look at how Icy Dock and grown to be arguably the best known name in hard drive racks for both features and quality.

A closer look

One of the most attractive features of Icy Dock's new enclosure is the space it takes up, or rather doesn't take up. All you multi hard drive users out there already noticed this I'm sure. Check out our review unit below. It can hold four drives and only requires three open 5.25" bays in which to do it. The MB453 unit (not shown) which holds three drives in two bays while the MB455 unit (also not shown) holds up to five drives and only takes up three 5.25" bays like the MB454.

Let me tackle the obvious question some of you have right off. Why would you want drives in a bay mounted rack instead of mounted inside the case? With SATA drives, the drives are hot swappable meaning if you have some files you want to take with you to another machine, the drive with your stuff on it is easily and quickly accessible. Lots of other uses come to mind. One perfect example is my main test bed which also doubles as my at home game rig. I use a SATA rack to swap out my drive with the optimized operating system and my games for a drive with a middle of the road generic Windows install that I use for testing products in reviews.

The Icy Dock MB45x line is offered only in black. From the bezel view we see its four laterally mounted pull out drive trays. Each tray is operated by a lever that is locked in place by the blue clips shown. Immediately to the left of each lever are indicator lamps. One lamp per drive bay shows green when under power, amber in relation to drive activity and red to indicate a drive failure. Also present on the front bezel are a fan failure and overheat warning lamp that light in conjunction with an alarm buzzer. Thank heaven that Icy Dock thought to put a reset button here also. Who wants to swap out a drive with a buzzer going off?