ICY DOCK MB982SPR-2S SATA HDD & SSD Raid Review

Today we are going to look at a very impressively designed drive caddy which can convert both 2.5 inch mechanical and solid state drives into RAID arrays. It is also built to withstand serious abuse and to fit inside a standard 3.5 inch drive bay. If you have several older drives gathering dust then this might just be the performance boost you need for a new system build. The Icy Dock MB982SPR-2S certainly isn't a very catchy name, but on paper it looks to be a very versatile unit with Raid 0, Raid 1 and BIG support. Unlike many units we have seen from the Far East in recent months, it is built from high quality metal so it won't be something you have to hide in shame within your new rig. Product Features Full Metal and Heavy Duty with Easy Access to Drives Converts your 2 x 2.5” SATA HDD or SSD to a 3.5” SATA HDD, for 3.5” SATA Drive Bay and Backplane usage. Windows and Mac Software for RAID Set Up Built in RAID featuring RAID 0, RAID 1, BIG and Port Multiplier Universal Mounting Holes For Most Common PC Cases Compatible with most 3.5” HDD Backplanes and Hot Swap Devices Compatible With Mac Pro Perfect For Power Users, System Integrators and IT Professionals The packaging and artwork certainly isn't going to help sell the product. An image of two drives being inserted into the chassis might have worked better for a store display environment. Inside, the unit is shipped inside a bubblewrap pouch with a few screws for mounting into a PC case. Icy Dock also supply a user manual. When the MB982SPR-2S is removed from the packaging we are presented with a heavy duty chassis crafted from durable metal. There is no doubt that this is made to very exacting standards. The chassis is vented on the top and front to help with airflow. The Icy Dock can accept drives with the standard 9.5mm height. The rear of the Icy Dock is home to the controller section, which offers PM, Raid 0, Raid 1 and BIG configurations (Port Multiplier mode requires a SATA Port Multiplier card in order to see 2 drives. Without a Port Multiplier card, only 1 drive will be seen). There are standardised Sata and power connectors here also for direct connection to a motherboard. The enclosure is really simple to use. There is a button on the back, which when pressed opens the hinged door at the top. There is a layered rack system, which can be pulled upwards to allow for two drives to be fitted on top of each other. The full enclosure is metal, but there is a thin plastic membrane to separate the drive and the delicate electronics from the metal chassis. One of the most appealing aspects of the Icy Dock design is that you don't have to physically force the drive into the connectors within the enclosure. The hinged outside lid is connected to the mechanism which seats the drives automatically. The video above highlights an install procedure which takes only a few seconds at most. If you pay close attention to the last section of the video you will notice that when the hinged door is closed, the mechanism inside slides the drives into locking position, connecting with the dual head sata controller at the right. As we said earlier, the operation of the drive is extremely logical and straightforward. To change the Raid mode, you need access to a little screwdriver which rotates a settings switch at the back. Confusingly we weren't aware that the reset button needed to be depressed during a boot up phase. While the manual fails to detail this properly the video above explains how to reset the drive to accept a new RAID configuration. When the Icy Dock is configured, there is optional JMicron HW Raid Manager software that can be installed. There really is no need to install this for generalised system duties, although you can use it to flash the firmware of the drive for future updates and bug fixes. You can delete the raid install from this software and configure other options if needed. There are some SMTP reporting options available in the software which may prove useful for an IT department/manager. For our review today we wanted to try something a little different. Using two SSD drives in the Icy Dock might seem like the logical course of action, but we feel that a huge portion of the audience buying this will already have one or two mechanical 2.5 inch drives in a drawer, from previous system upgrades. A standard 2.5 inch mechanical drive isn't going to set the performance world alight, even a 7,200 rpm model will peak around 85-110 MB/s. Therefore, with two drives in a RAID 0 configuration we could be looking at sequential performance of around 200 MB/s. While a mechanical drive will never match a quality SSD for overall levels of performance this theoretical 'Raid 0' bandwidth is now firmly in the 'SSD Budget' sector. Today we are using two Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB drives, configured in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more disks in the array (at a minimum, catastrophic data loss is almost twice as likely compared to single drives without RAID). A single disk failure destroys the entire array because when data is written to a RAID 0 volume, the data is broken into fragments called blocks. The number of blocks is dictated by the stripe size, which is a configuration parameter of the array. The blocks are written to their respective disks simultaneously on the same sector. This allows smaller sections of the entire chunk of data to be read off the drive in parallel, increasing bandwidth. RAID 0 does not implement error checking, so any error is uncorrectable. More disks in the array means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss. CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate Monitor: Dell U2410 Comparison Drive: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark HD Tach CrystalMark S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64. A sustainable 207.8 MB/s in the sequential read test is significantly faster than the 104 MB/s we recorded from a single drive. A mechanical drive configuration does not score well in the 4K tests, so an SSD will always give benefits here. I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible. HD Tach 3.0.4.0. records an average sequential bandwidth throughput of just over 175 MB/s. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. ATTO highlights the enhanced performance of the RAID 0 configuration, peaking around 200 MB/s with the read test and around 170 MB/s with the write test. It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific. Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. Boot time with a single drive is around 69 seconds, or 7 seconds slower than the 3.5 inch 1TB drive. When two Scorpios are configured inside the Icy Dock as Raid 0, the time is reduced to 43 seconds. A substantial decrease in waiting time. Adding a second drive reduces the STALKER Call Of Pripyat load time by 9 seconds. Easily noticeable. The Icy Dock MB932SPR-2S might ship in bland, instantly forgettable packaging, but inside lies one of the handiest little devices we have tested this year. Many people reading this will have at least one spare 2.5 inch drive in a drawer right now, gathering dust. If, like me, you find a single 2.5 inch drive too slow to incorporate into a new desktop system build, then the Icy Dock MB982SPR-2S will prove invaluable. Today we used two Western Digital Scorpio black 7,200 rpm drives for testing. One was taken from a laptop which we upgraded with a new Solid State Drive, another we ordered online specifically for this review for only £47 inc vat. With a Raid 0 configuration it is always best to keep the sizes and speeds identical. Testing showed that while the Raid 0 configuration is not as fast as a modern day SSD, the cost is significantly less. Lets say you already have a mechanical drive ready and you purchase another, like we did today. That is a cost of around £50. While the Icy Dock MB982SPR-2S can be bought at Scan and Overclockers in the UK for £60 we found it on Amazon for £54, with free Prime delivery. For a cost of around £100 you could end up with a 640GB Raid 0 array with generalised entry level solid state performance. Additionally, if you have having problems with the Raid configuration on your motherboard, then adding two identical Solid State drives would give an exceptionally high performance system. Just be aware of potential drawbacks ... such as saturating the bandwidth of a SATA 3Gbps or SATA 6Gbps port, depending on the drives you would use. For the price, this product is worth the modest outlay. It is very well constructed and feels as if it could withstand considerable abuse over the years. The only negative points we could mention would be the mundane packaging and the below average literature, which does not explain the Raid 'reset' feature very well. Just follow the video links earlier in this review and it will be straightforward to configure. Pros: Good price excellent build quality JMicron controller is very capable Cons: Poor manual rear switching mechanism is a little fiddly Kitguru says: An excellent addition to a system, breathing new life into older 2.5 inch drives.