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The IcyDock SSD Xpander is an interesting and rather unique design which may prove useful to a narrow audience using a very small 30GB or 40GB SSD. This product means they can expand the size of their boot configuration by pairing up with a large mechanical drive.
The build quality of the IcyDock XPander is without question, and it worked flawlessly out of the box for us without any problems and no drivers or software installation is required. We also feel the manual is much better than the last product we looked at, which suffered from a complete lack of literature.
In reality however we can't help but feel that IcyDock might be making a product that very few people will want. While we appreciate that a small portion of the enthusiast audience may be working with a small 30 or 40 GB SSD, we aren't sure that anyone will want to reduce overall flash drive performance.
Why?
Well, when we factor in the XPander price point of £38 inc vat, we see that this is basically 40 percent of the cost of a new 64GB Crucial RealSSD M4. In our experience a 64GB drive is more than enough for a Windows 7 operating system install, including applications such as Office and Adobe suite. If you already have a large 1TB hard drive, then storage demands are already sorted.
If you shop around, a 80GB Intel SSD can be purchased for £110 inc vat … or £70 if you factor in the cost of the Xpander which you may be contemplating. A 30GB or 40GB SSD could be sold online for £30 second hand, reducing this price even further.
While we have seen in this review that the performance paired with a quality SSD improves overall mechanical drive throughput, we also need to factor in in that a 7,200 rpm hard drive slows down the overall performance of even an entry level SSD.
It is a fascinating concept and we applaud IcyDock for trying new and inventive ideas, but in this case we really wonder if an enthusiast user will want to limit SSD performance by pairing it up with a mechanical drive. The best option in my opinion is to sell the tiny SSD, save the £40 cost of the Xpander and put it towards a slightly bigger solid state boot drive. This means you can still use your large mechanical drive for storage, but you will be getting the full performance of the solid state unit as a boot drive.
Pros:
- Creative thinking
- well built
- flawless operation in Windows 7
Cons:
- Money could be put towards a bigger SSD
- Slows down SSD performance.
- No support for SATA III 6Gbps interface.
Kitguru says: Unless this is something you specifically need, its better selling your small SSD and putting the cost of the Xpander into buying a 64GB (£90) or 80GB SSD (£110) then using your current mechanical drive for dedicated storage.
What an unusual idea.
It would be a fairly complex configuration to set up., I dont know anyone who uses diskmanager in windows to configure drives.
A user with a 40GB SSD is likely someone who bought a cheap prebuilt system, the thought of ripping the drive out, using this, then trying a complete reinstall of the OS is out of their league.
DOnt think this will sell well.
Interesting.
shame it isn’t more performance oriented with 6gbps sata support. thats always going to ruin performance. even with a 200mb/s SSD and a 100mb/s HDD its going to push the platform beyond the limits.
people who buy SSDs want 100% performance regardless. this is a fail imo.
Not all people who buying SSD want max. performance. Only hardcore geeks, enthusiast and people running benchmarks 24/7/365 need that.
I don’t care about 500MB/s transfers, I don’t care about booting time. All I need is relatively speedy access, decent size, low cost, and low seeking time when accessing really humongous directories. With 80, 100 or 200k files in one directory SSD offer good performance. But cost of creating multiple RAID arrays from SSDs is out of the question. I’m not that daft to spend money on multiple SSDs. Recently acquired old 240GB Samsung 220/200 works nicely. I don’t need mega ‘uber’ performance when you have one SSD and 20+ HDDs. It works as buffer for documents not as boot drive which is pointless anyway when each RAID card initialization takes couple minutes.
That IcyDock (and other similar) is a good product (with decent size SSD). Good value. Unless of course you see only SSDs and couldn’t care less about money.
pIC IS ONE hdd sATA ii IN, oNE OUT TO MAIN. rEALLY REVIVE SOME OLDER VERY EXPENSIVE hdd IF DID, SAY UP TO 5 hdd & HAS r.a.i.d. 5 CAPABILITIES. When caps lock quits, Random Array Intergrated Discs, might be abrv.
That way bunch of old stuff is used Or finally sold & RAID5 is tricky item, often failing after short set up. Max Blast is one of better discs for RAID. So with SSD , more SSD Capacity to Guide Silly ‘ole RAID5 to make Beast, with faster main &cpgpu, thanger, workable. Hit that 500, eeerrrr MB/s spot that scsi & sas have kept to own. by sata III w/ backward compatibility. new tome’: mix & cash….
drashek md
Guess, people are dumb these days. Page 5 says it all : do not buy this product.
Why, you say ?
1º see,read the benchmarks
2º You need to BUY any market SSD to use this c…p ?? Hello?
3º it´s from Icy = $$$$
If you have to buy or own a ssd drive, why in the name of konfuzius do you want to buy this, eh ?
O.o USE THE SSD!!!
Now, if this product came with an onboard ssd cache in the size of like say 32Gb, then sure why not, give your current old and probably outdated hd from 2004 a minimal perfromance boost, and the funny part is : it wont matter at all….
Put this on your vapoware or any 2011 thumbs down product- top ten list.
Creative thinking ?? 0 out of 128 Mario 64 Stars