Icy Box Hard Drive Docking Stations Review

Testing

Finally down to the nitty gritty, to try and see what performance gains are to be had by 2 types of connection available we have chosen to test the docks with a Vertex 120GB SSD. Now I can hear you all shouting that you are never going to do this in real life but where SSD's are notoriously fast it should make it very easy to see what gains or losses there are.

SATA II

All tests we carried out on a Rampage 3 with an i7 930. Benchmarking was done with HD Tune Pro and tested with 512kb Block sizes. We started off by getting testing the drive on a good old SATA2 port and we will use this test to compare the others too. Look at the average results we have a benchmark of 242MB/s read and 176MB/s writes - all very standard Vertex 120GB results.              

USB2

Next up the connection we all know and love, USB2. I think its fair to say none of us expect any records but its numbers all the same and without history how far do we know we have come? Average results here were 33.6MB/s read and 31.2MB/s write. A massive hit on the SATA results but at roughly 30MB/s its also right on target.

E-SATA

Now the first of the interesting results today, e-SATA. Ive read a lot of articles on e-SATA but this is  my first personal time ever actually testing it so I did not know what to expect. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised as we got average results of 103.8MB/s read and 121.4MB write. It did seem strange the write speed was faster but I tried the tests over and over and always got the same results. At those levels its more than fast enough to keep 99% of mechanical drives running as quick as if they were actually in your rig.

USB3

USB3 states that it has 5gb/s bandwidth available but all the GB/gb KB/kb difference are enough to confuse the people that actually designed them. Why they cant just tell us the real world results Ill never know. So is it quick I hear you say? Quick answer is yes, very quick. Quicker than I expected quick. When tested we got average results of 199.9MB/s read and 161.9MB/s write we have tested SSD's that couldn't provide results that good. We tested the USB3 on both the PCI-E add in card and the Rampage onboard and they both scored within .1MB/s of each other. Whether the 'lost' 40MB/s is the limitations of the USB3 bus or the ICYDOCK itself we'll never know till some significantly faster hardware is released. 

With all that out of the way lets whip over the page to wrap this little lot up.