Make hard drives your bare necessities for backup

The Icy Box eSATA/USB 2.0 2.5/3.5 inch hard drive dock makes a lot of sense if you need to back up a lot of data, which is a familiar requirement for many photographers.

The chances are that you use one, or more, external hard drives to keep back up copies of your photos, videos, documents, and other precious files. If you are really organised you will also use an external drive to backup your computer's system so you can get back up and running with all your installed programs after a hard drive failure. If, like me, you have several PCs and LOTS of data to back up, juggling several different external drives and their power supplies, plus associated wires, is not very appealing. And the most obvious method of connection via USB 2.0 is, from a performance perspective, far from ideal.

In the last few years a new solution has emerged; the hard drive dock. This is a free-standing unit you insert a bare hard drive into to create an instant external hard drive. The attractions of such a unit are support for higher performance PC connectivity than standard USB and the convenience of having a single unit into which any number of bare hard drives can be attached or detached in seconds. Some minor cash savings can be realised by purchasing bare hard drives instead of cased external drives with their power supplies, although such savings are not really that great as external hard drive packages are very competitively priced.

Viewed from the front the Icy Box hard drive dock, with bare 3.5 inch drive mounted, looks functional rather than beautiful, but the docking unit itself is well made and looks durable.

The better examples of hard drive docks now offer high performance connectivity to your computer, where supported, like eSATA and even USB 3.0. eSATA is a standard for implementing external SATA hard drives. SATA stands for Serial ATA, which is the standard hard drive interface for most computers today. eSATA can offer a theoretical 150-300MB/sec data transfer rate. This compares with USB 2.0 High Speed which has a theoretical maximum speed of 60MB/sec, although in reality it's unlikely to much exceed 30MB/sec. The emerging USB 3.0 standard, which is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports, offers similar potential transfer speeds to SATA. Our Icy Box unit supports both USB 2.0 High Speed and eSATA, but not USB 3.0, which is still comparatively rare at the time of writing.

eSATA ports can be found on some desktop and mini PCs. If you like to build your own PCs, there is a generous selection of PC motherboards that support eSATA connectivity. USB 3.0 is still relatively rare, but looks set to become a widely supported standard just as USB 2.0 has already become. Both eSATA and USB 3.0 are 'hot' plug and play compliant, so you can connect either devices without having to power-off first. That said, the instruction book for the Icy Box dock we tested did warn that some computers may not support plug and play properly, so it may be necessary to check that your computer is fully compliant. Depending on the BIOS support in your computer, you might be able to use your Icy Box dock as the boot drive if it has an installed operating system. Your system would then run rather slowly if connected via USB 2.0, but eSATA and USB 3.0 work at much the same speed as the normal internal SATA drive connection of your computer.

The Icy Box dock itself is a slightly unusual design because the 'front' where the status lights are situated is one of the narrow sides of the unit. It's more common to see designs where the 'front' is the wider end. This tends to make the dock box bigger and bulkier than it needs to be, so the Icy Box configuration is space efficient. Looking down onto the top of the unit you will see a flap that partially protects the SATA data and power ports that connect directly with the corresponding ports on the hard drive. The Icy Box can accept both 2.5 inch drives that you will usually find in notebook computers and some compact mini PCs as well as traditional 3.5 inch hard drives. The smaller 2.5 inch drives fit through a gap in the flap.

Here is a side view of the Icy Box dock showing the flap that partially covers the SATA connectors. The small slot cut out of the flap accommodates a 2.5 inch drive without the main flap having to move. The protrusion you can see at the back is the on/off power button.

Once the drive has been pushed home, you can connect to the host PC using either a USB cable (USB 2.0 High Speed with respect to our Icy Box test unit) or eSATA cable. Power is provided by a compact power supply unit with integrated mains plug pins. More up market docks come with laptop-style power supplies with a separate mains lead. The Icy Box does have a push button on/off switch at the back of the unit adjacent to the eSATA and USB ports. With power on a blue disc at the front of the unit glows softly, while a smaller blue LED blinks to indicate drive activity.

In use I was very pleased with the performance of the Icy Box dock. I used a brand new Samsung EcoGreen 2TB 3.5 inch bare drive and formatted it using Windows while it was installed in the Icy Box dock connected to our PC via the provided eSATA cable. A second Samsung 2TB drive was installed in our desktop PC connected via SATA. No radical differences in the performances of either drives was noticed. Connected to a laptop vie USB 2.0 the Icy Box dock worked exactly as how we would expect a USB external hard drive to. I was able to try a variety of SATA bare drives using the Icy Box dock and no problems or issues were encountered. It worked perfectly via both eSATA and USB.

The rear end of the Icy Box dock reveals the eSATA port (top), USB 2.0 port (underneath), then the domed power switch and, finally, the external power supply socket.

Conclusion

It's a bit odd to see the bulk of bare hard drive sticking out of the dock box, but from a functionality point of view it does the job. At around the £25 mark and, if you shop around, around £65-£70 for a 2TB bare drive, you have a very flexible and high-performance external storage solution for well under £100, and it appears to be well made too. So without any hesitation we're happy to award a 'RECOMMENDED' logo for the Icy Box eSATA/USB 2.0 2.5/3.5 inch hard drive dock:

Alternatives worth considering

The Icy Box is not the only hard drive dock worth considering. See some alternatives listed on page 2 of this article.

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