One of my recent purchases was this Icy Box Docking Station for 2.3” + 3.5” HDD which features a SATA + USB Interface. I bought this one from Aria UK for £18. I already own a 3.5” SATA Drive bay which features USB & eSATA but did not have the eSATA Lead and there is no way I was going to spend loads on postage just for a cheap lead. Having a handful of loose 2.5” SATA Drives hanging about as well as some 3.5” Models plus the Dell I own having eSATA built in as standard – I was good to go.
Build and construction
The device does not feel cheap and is heavy enough to stay on the desk even without drives. It has two lights on the front, the blue circle light tells you it is on and the blue light underneath is the access light.
Around the back we have eSATA, USB, On/Off Switch and the power lead. You can only use one or the others (eSATA or USB) at a time. The top has a flap with a space for 2.5” drives to fit in. If you plug in a 3.5” Drive, the Flap goes down and this could be prone to breaking – I know we managed to break the one at work (different make) in the same day.
Using the device
I plugged the eSATA lead into the computer and the drive bay, powered on and booted Windows 7 64bit. No immediate sign of anything been installed come forth and I guess that made sense as the eSATA interface was already installed and working. I plugged in a Drive and again – nothing happened, I checked Disk Management, nothing in there – did I just get a broken device?
I went to device manager, right clicked and checked for new hardware and it found the drive itself (in this case a Toshiba) and going back to disk management presented me with a 80GIG drive to play with. As I had put Linux on this drive, it had no drive letters and such, so I had to re-partition and reformat – then it came up as Q Drive (I had picked that letter). I repeated the same with another 2.5” Drive – same thing as before but once all completed , the good thing was I could hot swap the drives at will.
Thoughts
I bought this device as I felt I needed to be swapping drives around and while a enclosed case works just fine, they are not suited to keep taking them apart. I can use this to image drives (Norton Ghost) for example and many other uses and I feel the price is worth the end product. eSATA by the way is way faster then USB or FireWire – by a long stretch.
