ICY Dock Blizzard MB080U3S-1SB 3.5” USB 3.0/eSATA External Enclosure Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. ICY Dock MB080U3S-1SB Enclosure4. Testing and Performance Results5. 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 true and full performance of the ICY Dock Blizzard Enclosure.

Of course this enclosure is more likely to be used with high capacity drives for offline backup and storage but this will show the maximum theoretical speeds.

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

From these results we can see that the device is limited via USB 3.0 at a speed of nearly 160 MB/s, this is fast but no where near the maximum theoretical speed of the Kingston HyperX SSD.

Using an eSATA connection will give you slower speeds of around 110 MB/s and USB 2.0 is unsurprisingly limited to just 32 MB/s. There is clearly a big advantage using USB 3.0 over USB 2.0 but this is not the best performing enclosure on the market.

Become a Patron!