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Generally when someone mentions hard drive enclosures I associate this phrase with plastic external enclosures with USB or Firewire connections. What I don’t think of is a 5.25″ bay hard drive enclosure like the item I have to review today. The people of ICY DOCK sent me one of their single bay enclosures for review, the MB122 Internal Enclosure. Before you dismiss this product as another useless fluff product I would suggest that you think of instances where this product could actually be helpful. Off the top of my head I can think of a few, so keep this in mind as you read.

First Impression

When I was informed that I’d be reviewing this product I really didn’t know what to expect. The only time I have ever dealt with something similar to this was the RAID array in a Dell Poweredge and these two items have about as much in common as a truck and a family sedan. When I pulled the MB122 out of the packaging I immediately noticed one thing, this product was solid. Nothing wiggled, the screws were all beveled and flush, and the aluminum and plastic complimented each other rather nicely. The front of the unit featured a LCD that displays hard drive vitals and to the right there is a nice latching system with a key and lock. Besides the front bezel and the rear connection board, the entire unit was constructed out of aluminum. The MB122 had nearly identical dimensions to both my CD and DVD burners so keep this in mind when purchasing this unit. Once the unit has been opened up it becomes very obvious how much attention was paid to the minor details. On the backside of the unit there is a 30mm exhaust fan that sucks out the hot air surrounding the drive and prevents a heat pocket from forming. The hard drive tray is a removable tray that features two solid ports for a SATA data and power cable. On the backside of the tray there are mirrored SATA data and power connectors that mate up with identical data and power ports on the enclosures backplane. Once I had installed my SATA drive I spent some time testing how well these connections would hold up and no matter how rough I was with the unit I never managed to snag or jam the connections. All the alignments were perfect which is just another product of fine engineering.

When installing the unit into my system I really appreciated the ability to choose between a Molex and SATA power cable to power the unit. I personally don’t like SATA power cables as they don’t feel as secure as a Molex connector so I opted for the Molex power connection. With the unit screwed down and my hard drive installed I booted up my computer and everything checked out perfectly. With the computer running the LCD panel displays the temperature of the enclosure, the current up-time for the drive, and the Master/Slave status of the drive. Unlike some other temperature monitoring panels I really liked the soft blue hue that the panel emitted as it complimented the blue LEDs that were installed in my Lanboy case. One feature that could be very useful in dense environments was a thermal alarm. If the enclosure reaches a user specified temperature than an alarm will sound and the LCD will display a warning. I could imagine this would be very useful if several of these were installed in the particularly harsh corporate server environment.

The Family

One particular feature that I think should be pointed out is modular design of part of ICY DOCK’s product line. Besides the MB122, the MB123, and MB452 enclosures all share the same drive tray design which enables these trays to be exchanged. The MB452 is the mobile version of the MB123 and all three enclosures can be hotswapped. There are so many things that this enables a person to do. You can use multiple enclosures and a single drive to transfer data, you can use the enclosure to mirror a particular hard drive such as a server disk image, or my personal favorite would be using this in a HTPC (home theater PC) to transfer movies and TV shows from a desktop or server to a quiet HTPC in the living room. The possibilities are endless, I am sure you could think of a case where having this functionality would have been very beneficial.

The Test

Hard drives aren’t very particular about where they live. Just give them a little bit of moving air and they will be very happy. To test out the thermal capabilities of the MB122 I decided to severely thrash the drive to give some worst-case results. I tested this enclosure in my Antec Super Lanboy with 120mm intake and exhaust fans spinning at ~1200 RPM. My powersupply featured two 80mm exhaust fans in series that were spinning at ~800 RPM. The baseline test included my Maxtor Diamondmax 10 and Seagate Barracude 7200.8 drives in the drive cages cooled by the 120mm intake fan. The test sequence started with the computer starting from a coldboot and after 15 minutes I recorded the idle temperature. Then I began transferring a 10 GB file from the Maxtor to the Seagate while defragmenting the Seagate and performing an anti-virus scan on the Seagate. After 45 minutes I recorded the temperature of the drive and then shut the system down and vented it with a 30cm fan. Once the drives were cooled down to ambient I installed the Seagate drive in the enclosure and repeated the tests and recorded the temperatures.

Results

The ambient temperature fluctuated between 22 and 24 Celsius during the tests depending on how the airconditioning was cycling. The hard drive temperatures came from the S.M.A.R.T. sensors installed in the drives while the processor temperature came form the core diode. The case ambient temperature settled at a solid 27 Celsius during both idle states and 28 Celsius during both load states. During the drive cage tests in the idle state the processor registered 35 Celsius, the Seagate was 33 Celsius, and the Maxtor was 32 Celsius. During load the processor crept to 37 Celsius, the Seagate to 36 Celsius, and the Maxtor stayed at 32 Celsius. In the drive enclosure idle tests the processor maintained 34 Celsius, the Seagate 34 Celsius, and the Maxtor 31 Celsius. During load the processor hovered around 37 Celsius, the Seagate was 38 Celsius, and the Maxtor was 32 Celsius.

The hard drive enclosure performed much better than I was expecting. I have routinely seen external enclosures reach temperatures above 40 Celsius in idle states so 38 Celsius during load isn’t bad at all. Considering that the enclosure was competing against a 120mm fan blowing over a very open drive cage the results were pretty good. I just thought that I should note that I never heard the 30mm enclosure fan so it didn’t add any excessively loud noises or vibrations. One should also take into consideration the performance that most OEM and generic cases generate in regards to thermals. Most cases don’t feature any active hard drive cooling so there is a good chance that in these cases the enclosure would perform better than the drive cages.

Conclusion

This solid product did a great job in both the abuse and thermal testing that I performed upon it. If you are in the market for modular storage or a more secure storage solution that I would highly recommend this product. The MB122 does its job very well and it maintains a very stylish appearance with a clean front bezel. For those systems administrators that need easy access to hard drives I would highly suggest checking out ICY DOCK’s lineup as the durable construction should be able to handle any abuse while maintaining great thermal levels. I myself will be using this enclosure to house my operating system drive as I tend to swap out OS drives during benchmarking runs. If you need extra hard drive space, a secure environment, active temperature monitoring, or portability than the MB122 would be a great fit. I would like to thank Jack from ICY DOCK and Paul Stamatiou for referring me to ICY DOCK.