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The ICY Dock MB080U3S is certainly an unusual design – resembling an air intake on a jet airliner. The company have stretched the front of the enclosure in the center to allow an 80mm fan to be incorporated. We hope they haven't opted for a loud, fast spinning model however.
The sides of the enclosure have a sleek look and include a single button on each side for releasing the front for access to the drive.
From several angles this enclosure looks good, and we certainly think it stands out in a crowded market. On the back is a power socket, an on/off switch, an eSATA port, and a USB 3.0 port.
As well as this there is a brightness dial for the LED and a fan controller with 3 positions (High/Low/Auto).
If you press both buttons on either side of the enclosure the fan unit pops out. Cleverly there are no connections to the enclosure, so this can be removed easily.
The fan itself is a standard unbranded 80mm computer fan. On the bottom left are two clear panels to allow the two LED's (for power and data activity) to shine through. On the top right are the two pins which provide power to this fan unit.
Looking inside the device we can see that the PCB board is secured at the back of the device – this is no surprise as this is where the I/O connections are. There is a simple metal bracket that guides a 3.5″ drive into place, and also holds it securely during operation.
After adding the two feet the device is very stable but still doesn't take up much desk space.
The ICY Dock enclosure is a bit longer than a 3.5″ drive, mainly as it incorporates the fan at the front.
Installing the device is just a case of sliding it in, although you do need to make sure the HDD is the right way round first.
Interesting product but I wonder where the market is. The only market I see for 3.5″ enclosures is for reusing old drives you’ve replaced with bigger ones, and I’m not going to spend a lot of money on that.
Simply put this review is a complete waste of time, and reads like a brochure.
You reviewed a Hard Drive enclosure purposely designed for cooling, and didn’t even put a Hard Drive inside it!
You put in an SSD (which as everyone knows generate allot less heat in use).
So your whole review tests the speed capabilities of this units I/O board.
Simply put who cares about the throughput on an enclosure such as this, it’s whole purpose is to cool large capacity Hard Drives, and with the current generation of HDD’s experiencing overheat problems in standard enclosures, it might be nice to see a thermal graph / diagram of this units performance over time.
This review is a perfect example of a lazy and stupid product testing, that anyone on any computer could do in there sleep.