Icy Dock MB559U3S External 3.5″ SATA Hard Drive Enclosure Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. ICY Dock External Enclosure4. Testing Methodology and Performance Results5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

To test this ICY Dock enclosure we will be using a fast solid state drive … the Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB. As such we will be able to see the true and full performance of the ICY Dock Blizzard Enclosure.

We also tested this device with a Maxtor DiamondMax 20 3.5″ hard drive … just to see how the ICY Dock chassis deals with a hot running mechanical drive.

Processor: AMD Bulldozer FX 8-core 8150 CPU @ 4.2 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
Cooler: Antec Kuhler H20 920 CPU Cooler
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1800+ MHz
Graphics Cards: AMD Radeon 6450 HD (GPU @ 850 MHZ, Memory Clock @ 1000 MHz)
Power Supply: Akasa Venom Power 750W
Boot Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSD (OS only)

OS: Windows 7 Home Edition 64bit

Software: CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64

SSD 1 (for speed testing): Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSD

HDD (for testing): Maxtor DiamondMax 20

The performance of this ICY Dock enclosure is good, but the Solid State drive is clearly being limited by the USB 3.0 interface.

We know the Kingston HyperX 3k SSD is much faster when connected to a SATA 3 Gbps port. That said, it certainly won't hinder performance when paired up with standard 3.5″ HDD via the eSATA or USB 3.0 connectors.

USB 2.0 runs at a rather restricted speed and we can see this clearly from the results as USB 3.0 is 5x faster than USB 2.0.

In terms of acoustical performance, the MB559U3S is very impressive. While we could hear the Maxtor mechanical drive it was much louder outside the chassis. After using the DiamondMax drive under stressful conditions for an hour, the temperature didn't reach a critical level.

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