Icy Dock Plug and Play Mobile Rack

On the rear of the rack, are your power and USB 2.0 ports.  Also present is a 40mm cooling fan.  I’m not sure how much good this fan will do because the hole it blows into the unit bay is roughly 10mm wide. 

Access to the inside of the unit bay is accomplished by depressing a small catch on the top of the unit which allows the top of the removed bay to slide back, exposing the inside of the bay.

Your hard drive attaches to the ribbon cable and four-pin Molex connector as would a normal HDD installation.  The drive is then secured into both sides of the unit bay to keep it from sliding around.

Under power, the LCD lights up with a yellowish-green backlight.  Temperature of the inside of the bay is monitored in either Celsius or Fahrenheit.  Hard drive activity is displayed along with whether your drive is set as a master or a slave.  I’m not sure exactly how useful this is but a drive usage time display is shown on the pic above right.  This displays the number of hours the rack and subsequently the drive, has been in operation.  Back to the temperature display, a trip temperature can be set so that an internal alarm goes off should the temperature in the bay reach a certain point.  The alarm also sounds if there is a fan failure.

This is the unit installed in one of our test beds.  It blends in and adds a certain amount of “snazzy-ness.”

Performance

To test our rack we are going to run SiSoft Sandra 2003's File System Benchmark on our test drive with it hooked up as a slave via standard IDE ribbon cables and then the same drive again in the USB 2.0 Rack.  The IDE connection will without a doubt best the USB transfer rate but lets see the score differences.  We ended up running 10 benchmarks on each drive, throwing out the high and low of each respective unit.  We ran a higher number of tests because our results were very surprising.  Our standard cursory statement please.

No two systems will perform identically, or for that matter, there will be variations within a single system to some degree depending on several factors.   Hence, our results may end up being a little better or a little worse than the results you may get in your own box.

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