| | Articles | | Tagan Icy Box IB-3218 Enclosure Review | Published on September 15th, 2008
Today we have the chance to look at the Icy Box IB-3218 external
enclosure. What makes this enclosure different from so many
others? Well his enclosure supports two SATA hard drives across a single
USB 2.0 cable unlike many that only have room for one. Our thanks go
out to Tagan for providing us with this review sample; they also make
some interesting cases and power supplies. The contents consist of the
Icy Box enclosure, backup software, driver CD, a USB cable, a small
external power supply and a rather limited manual. The CD
offers a USB driver for those users still stuck in Windows 98 world
along with FNet PCClone EX Lite backup software.
Installation was very straight forward we just had to remove two screws
from the bottom of the unit so that the internals could slide out and
house our SATA hard drive. The unit will support two drives but
for our testing we only had one drive available to us. The
drive just slides into place and connects to the provided ports for
power and data transfer. The image that follows shows a drive
in the tray, and where to secure the drive by using two screws on each
side of the drive.
To test the speed of the Icy Box enclosure we fired up HD Tach and HD
Tune which are two commonly used disk benchmarking tools. First we ran HD
Tach and after running both the quick and long test we achieved pretty
much identical results. Our burst speeds were 35.2 MB/sec on the quick
test and 36.3 MB/sec on the long test. CPU utilization was very low
between 3 and 4 percent; the random access time was just over 15ms and
the average read speeds for both tests we 34.9 MB/sec
HD Tune was next up and we used it to compare read and write times with
both a 64MB file as well as a 512MB file. Both test produced almost
identical results as shown in the image below. All things
considered the Icy Box enclosure has produced rather impressive numbers
for a USB drive enclosure.
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