The face of the Icy Dock MB452 is easily what sets it
apart from the other external removable racks on the market. Nice and
simple, clean lines, and no flashy LEDs to distract. The silver lever allows the drive caddy to be pulled out, and hids the
lock. The lock has three positions, locked with power and without, and unlocked. In locked
mode, the HDD is given power and is accessible to the system. In unlocked mode the HDD does not
receive power and the drive caddy can be removed.
At the rear of the Icy Dock MB452
is a 40mm cooling fan, the power jack, USB2.0 jack and eSATA socket. Above the
two data ports is a small switch that toggles between USB or eSATA (it is hard
to see here, and easy to forget about.
As you can see, the Serial ATA back plane in
the drive caddy sports a single Serial ATA/power connector which is
physically compatible with every Serial ATA HDD on the market. Just slide in a
SATA hard drive and secure it via the mounting holes at the bottom of the caddy
with a few
screws.
We're not going to benchmark a SATA hard drive
in the Icy Dock MB452 because serial ATA devices like this do not have any
significant impact on data transfer speeds. When used in USB2.0 mode, data
transfer speeds are a little slower.