ICY DOCK MB664US-1S: eSATA with a twist
by Dave Robinet on October 9, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
ICY DOCK's line of products has continued to expand over the years. While they have always kept pace with market trends and interface configurations, their current generation of external enclosures has been of particular interest to the AnandTech labs. The ICY DOCK MB664US-1S is the latest such product to grace our labs, and we'll put it through the paces in this review.
As has been discussed in previous articles, there are three current mainstream interfaces used for high-speed data transfer: FireWire, USB, and eSATA.
USB 2.0 undoubtedly has achieved the greatest level of proliferation for external interfaces, despite lacking the bandwidth for serious data transfer. FireWire has been around the longest, though its market penetration has been stunted due to early patent and royalty disputes. The relative newcomer, eSATA, is the focus of most recent high-performance external hard drive enclosures. ICY DOCK has remained agnostic, supporting all three interfaces on various configurations of their enclosures (including different versions of the MB664).
The ICY DOCK MB664US-1S, which offers both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports, is the subject of this review.
ICY DOCK's line of products has continued to expand over the years. While they have always kept pace with market trends and interface configurations, their current generation of external enclosures has been of particular interest to the AnandTech labs. The ICY DOCK MB664US-1S is the latest such product to grace our labs, and we'll put it through the paces in this review.
As has been discussed in previous articles, there are three current mainstream interfaces used for high-speed data transfer: FireWire, USB, and eSATA.
| eSATA, Firewire and USB Comparison | |||
| eSATA | FireWire 800 (1394b) | USB 2.0 | |
| Peak Transfer Rate (MB/sec) | 300 | 100 | 60 |
| Cable Length (M) | 2 | 4.5 | 5 |
| Daisy Chain Capable | No | Yes | Yes |
USB 2.0 undoubtedly has achieved the greatest level of proliferation for external interfaces, despite lacking the bandwidth for serious data transfer. FireWire has been around the longest, though its market penetration has been stunted due to early patent and royalty disputes. The relative newcomer, eSATA, is the focus of most recent high-performance external hard drive enclosures. ICY DOCK has remained agnostic, supporting all three interfaces on various configurations of their enclosures (including different versions of the MB664).
The ICY DOCK MB664US-1S, which offers both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports, is the subject of this review.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
19 Comments
View All Comments
Souka - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Drives have two basic benchmarks... latency and throughput.comments like, "a 500gb is almost equal"..or "those raptors are not worth the cost" kinda ignore the latency part of the equation.
Yes, most 500GB drives equal, perhaps surpass, an older 150gb Raptor in some throughput benchmarks. But latency is still the raptors domain, and overal performance benifts quite a bit from this.
There are plenty of articles on such a topic...
My $.02
retrospooty - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
"The fact is for the price of a 150GB raptor you can get a 500-750GB drive that performs almost as well. Now that there are better performing drives available, those raptors just are not worth the cost anymore."almost as well, yes, but the 150gb Raptor is 2 years old now, it was released on Jan 1st 2006. They are due for an update any time now (prolly Jan 1st 2008) and you can bet that a 300g (or higher) Raptor with 32mb cache and Perpendicular recording will own the market once again by a large margin.
lennylim - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
I bought the MB559. The attraction to me is that I can get additional trays for $20 (expensive, but not too expensive). At $70 for one enclosure, this seems overpriced.The power connector on the bracket is very attractive to me, actually. I wish the MB559 comes with one. They had a MIR last month where you can get one free if you bought a MB559, but I bought mine too early. You can have the bracket installed on your home machine, so that you can have the power adapter in your laptop bag all the time. And reducing a wall wart is always a good idea to me. The bracket us available for purchase, but at over $20 shipped, it's too expensive for me.
ninjit - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
The product info for the MB664US-1S on ICY DOCK's website touts the ability to hotswap the actual hard-drive in the enclosure.Did you test this, and/or have any comments?
FrankThoughts - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
Page three says "We implemented AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) in the BIOS to properly test the hot swap capabilities of this drive enclosure when utilizing the eSATA interface. Without the proper matrix storage driver support and AHCI implementation, hot swapping was not possible with our test bed."I would assume that means with the test chipset and those drivers installed, hotswap works. Using it with other chipsets and drivers? Sounds like something they could maybe test further on other systems.
Olaf van der Spek - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
Why is power over SATA never used? Then you could stick with a single connector and not need the external power supply (except when you use USB).ninjit - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
There is no power over SATA.the SATA spec designed a NEW power connector, over the old Molex one, which is inline with the data-connector allowing easy cable-less drive installations, through direct mating to backplanes, but it's still a separate power connector and needs its own cable otherwise.
eSATA (which is what's tested here with the ICY-DOCK) is just data, there is no associated external power port to go a long with it.
Olaf van der Spek - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link
> There is no power over SATA.Not over the SATA data cable, no.
Let's rephrase the question: why aren't SATA connectors/cables used that transport both data and power?
Souka - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Well, here's my thoughts why.1. The power would then have to come from the motherboard, which means more tracepaths on the circuit board and power drawn from the motherboard itself.
2. SATA cables would be bigger, and you'd have two SATA cable standards
3. Power and data on same cable for SATA might cause interference with the data trasnsfer quality.
4. Power and Data on a mass storage device hasn't been the standard in the past, and changing standards is a risk manufacturers often won't take.
My $.02