Icy Dock send us their latest compact external housing for 2.5inch HDDs. This unit features a sleek design and color scheme, comes with USB 2.0 and eSATA (optional). It has a complete tool less design and installation of a new HDD takes only a few seconds!
Conclusive Thoughts
Conclusive Thoughts
The market is flooded with external storage solutions, going from USB sticks to network attached terabyte boxes. Finding a product which suites your exact needs shouldn’t be too hard with the plethora of choice out there.
A small yet important note to make regarding the MB668 (and most external 2.5” enclosures), if you use a 5400rpm or SSD drive you can get away by only using one USB connection, if however you put a 7200rpm HDD inside most likely you’ll have to use the extra power cable, thereby losing an extra USB port. ICY DOCK includes both cables with the product, user-friendly wise it would have been nice if these two cables were combined into one, making it less likely you’ll forget either one.
All the major hard drive manufacturers are offering external HDD products, so why chose a separate enclosure? Several reasons come to mind:
Easy upgrade: you can just swap out the disk inside with a larger model and you’re good to go. The MB668 supports disks up to 750Gb, for a pocket sized enclosure, that’s not too shabby.
Disaster Recovery: no matter how reliable the hard drive is you bought, in the end they all do stop working some day. Depending on the prefab enclosure they are build-into, performing any data recovery will be made more difficult. With easy access to the disk inside the MB668 it should increase your chances of data recover a tiny bit.
Price ?: Let’s compare a few 160Gb 2.5” disks + the $20 ICY DOCK MB668U-1SB to 2.5" prefab USB 2.0 external HDDs from a few manufacturers, prices are from Newegg.com:
Depending on the size of the disk you plan to use, you’ll find the price to be quite competitive even when you invest in a separate enclosure like the MB668U from ICY DOCK. Sure you will be able to find some nice deals on external disks drives, but don’t forget if you upgrade a laptop drive somewhere in the house, you can reuse it as an external and portable HDD for only $20 which is hardly expensive and definitely worth considering.
Overall we’re quite impressed by this enclosure from ICY DOCK which offers care free installation and features a slick design, at a wallet-friendly $20 you can do much worse than the MB668.
ICY DOCK has put much attention in offering their (potential) customers as much information as possible, below you’ll find one of many small video clips they’ve made of their products showcasing the most important features. The MB668US-1SB is the subject of the video below:
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