ICY Dock 5.25″ Hot Swap Drive Caddy for 2.5″ and 3.5″ Drive Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. ICY Dock Hot Swap Drive Caddy4. Testing Methodology and Performance5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

To test this ICY Dock enclosure we will be using one of the fastest SSD's out there, the Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB drive. As such we will be able to see the full performance of the ICY Dock MB971 Drive Caddy.

As there is also a 3.5″ bay, and as this is more likely to be used with high capacity drives for offline backup and storage, we are also going to use a Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 rpm HDD to give a more standardised performance result.

Processor: AMD Bulldozer FX 8-core 8150 CPU @ 4.2 GHz

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
Cooler: Antec Kuhler H20 920 CPU Cooler
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1800+ MHz
Graphics Cards: AMD Radeon 6450 HD (GPU @ 850 MHZ, Memory Clock @ 1000 MHz)
Power Supply: Akasa Venom Power 750W
Boot Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB (OS only)

OS: Windows 7 Home Edition 64bit

Software: CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1

SSD 1 (for testing): Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB

HDD 1 (for testing): Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 rpm

Using our Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB SSD we achieved good results, the speeds were consistently over 300 MB/s. That said, this drive can perform at over 500 MB/s so this is slower than the maximum theoretical values that we could expect to see.

The speeds through the 3.5″ bay, using a mechanical drive, are of course much slower, but these are equivalent to direct SATA connection speeds. Luckily the bandwidth bottle necking seen using one of the fastest SSD's on the market is certainly not going to affect the transfer speeds with a mechanical hard drive.

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