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.      

IOMEGA 500GIG USB2 Drive

Some time ago, I was looking around for a 500GIG Drive which I could plug into my iMac – I Was not that bothered about the colour as such but I wanted a Quiet Drive, one that never went to Sleep (and slowed down the machine when it had to spin up again) plus has 500GIG of Space to match my Internal Drive of the Mac. The price was right on the IOMEGA and at about £50 (which at the time was cheaper then online) and it was Silver so it matched the iMac.

Around the Back

The Drive is pure USB2 only, has a Power Switch and a small external power supply. The Drive can be placed flat or using the supplied holder – be placed vertically so it takes up the least amount of desktop space. The case is made of Aluminium which aids with the cooling so this keeps the drive quite – this saves having a noisy fan on the back (though it does have a fan in there).

Lights and thoughts

As you can see from the photo – it has a Blue LED which does light up the room if it is dark – this is where the handy on/off switch comes into play. The Drive does not go to sleep or if it does, it spins up pretty fast. The Interface inside is SATA and the drive itself is pretty slim compared to some model’s I have seen. I have not tested the speed but its not as fast as an internal of course as it’s limited by the USB2 interface. I would have bought a Firewire one but the cost of these for some reason is a lot more. I rate this drive over the other’s I have (320GIG Model) and would buy the same make again.

In light of the previous Post, I choose to go out and buy a External SATA usb2/E-Sata box and have all three drives connected via USB to the laptop shared out which then can be left on 24/7. The Laptop also serves as a WoW Server, Web Server etc. This gives me 1TB share, 500GIG Share and finally 320GIG Share. Maybe now I can put everything from DVD (Apps, Games etc) available on drives and easier to find.

I have a few systems around me with various hardware and OS but there is the one goal which would be served by me just buying a NAS Server but of course that cost me money. The drives worth a Mention are:

1 x 1 TB Internal SATA Drive
2 x 250 Internal SATA Drive
500GIG USB2 External SATA Drive (Iomega)
320GIG USB2 External PIDE Drive (Segate)
2 x 60GIG 2.5″ Drives (external)
120 GIG PATA Drive

Now I have a few options as it were and at the moment, the top 3 drives all live on my Core 2 Duo machine but as noted last night, this is too loud to be left on. The Dell only has room for one Drive but I could hazard a guess that it could be used as a FreeNAS and hold the 1TB Drive plus external Drives. I have an old Athlon Machine as well which happens to have 2 SATA Connectors and space to hold 3 HD (though they would get hot). I am bsy exploring the various ways to get the best use of the drives across all machines and I a not too happy to be leaving on any machine that will be generating any noise.