Icy Box Hard Drive Docking Stations Review

Conclusion

Hmmmm where do I start? Both the docks tested today are well priced and well made. Both perform very well, we can't compare them to each other as both feature very different ways of connecting to your rig. It's worth considering that if your motherboard does not have USB3 support that you will need to factor in the cost of the PCIE add in card as well. Thankfully even a pukka add-on USB3.0 card is cheap and so the benefits of the USB 3.0 interface are available to all.

What started as a review I thought would be very mundane, turned out to really surprise me. The USB3 results were brilliant. I was very much a member of the 'is it really needed' team, but after testing this today I'm actually looking forward to seeing what other manufacturers bring to the table next. Good on Icy Box for jumping on the USB3 train nice and early.

It may appear that such incredible transfer rates would be fairly pointless for an external drive. But the benefits of having your data secure on an external drive are multiple. If your PC/Laptop gets stolen you could have your data kept safely elsewhere. Or work from home without lugging that laptop around. Or even have a backup copy of Windows for finding those errors in your current installation. On most modern motherboards you will even be able to use drives in these docks as boot drives without sacrificing much, if any performance depending if you use a top flight SSD or not.

The only thing you need to decide out of these two docks is how fast do you need your transfers to be? If you don't have USB3 or high performance drives then buy the IB-112 e-SATA dock. If you have USB3 now and need high speed transfers, or just fancy a bit of good old 'just in case' future proofing then the IB-110 could be the buy for you. Icy Box may hate me for pointing this out but the USB3 cable on the 110 will also work on USB2 if push comes to shove, albeit heavily bottle-necked.

Pros
- Relatively low price
- Convenient to use
- Performance to please almost every user
- Small desktop footprint

Mediocre
- Is not as fast a internal SATA transfers

Cons
- Nothing

Thanks to Icy Box for the samples today, you can discuss this review in our forums.