On Our Desk - 15

Icy Dock MB672 HDD Enclosure

Manufacturer: Icy Dock
UK Price (as reviewed): £33.10 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): TBD

As we said just a few hundred words ago, the Akasa All in One 2 is a pretty solid thing for a card reader – but that was before we even saw the Icy Dock MB672 SATA hard drive enclosure.

Let’s be blunt – the MB672 is built like a brick outhouse. The armies of Rome could attack this thing with their full might and it would likely weather the storm. The counter-attack would probably be quite disappointing though.

Designed to slot into the front of your PC chassis as a 5.25” drive, the MB672 is made from unreasonably heavyweight steel and is surrounded on all sides with metal, with the exception of the door at the front and the ports at the back. It’s the first hard drive enclosure we’ve seen that actually looks like it expects to be attacked by the Roman army.


Obviously designed with security in mind then, the MB672 has a little lock on the front which can be used to open the door even when the PC is turned on – very handy if you’re constantly swapping hard drives in and out.

Of course, it does have to be pointed out that anyone hoping that would-be data-thieves are going to be deterred by this lock-and-key is being at least slightly stupid. If the hard drive is locked inside then all someone needs do is turn the PC on and copy the data off of it. If passwords prove a problem then nabbing the whole computer, or just the enclosure, isn’t going to be too difficult.

That is obviously a problem with all enclosures though, which makes us think that the lock and reinforced construction are more to protect users against annoying vibrations than theft. By making sure that nearly everything on the MB672 can lock down, Icy Dock has essentially eliminated any hard drive vibration.

Swapping hard drives over is incredibly easy too – there’s a lever in the back of the case that lifts the drive partway out when the door is opened. Closing the door guides the disk down onto the ports correctly too, which means you don’t have fiddle around with it. If that point seems a bit banal and a total non-issue then you should know that I originally had a hilarious joke on the topic that I was leading up to, but I cut it out because of how NSFW it was.


The main feature of the MB672 is the small screen mounted in the door. Using this and the three buttons below it you can monitor the temperature of the hard drive, check to see when the drive in that case is being written to and make sure the small fan in the back is working. If it gets clogged by a wire or something then you can set an alarm to sound.

We will offer one warning though – the beeping is very loud if you’ve not mounted the enclosure in a chassis and can easily provoke ire from co-workers and office-bound puppies.

All in all then the MB672 enclosure is a good bit of kit, although it does power itself over molex and not offer a choice for powered SATA connections. Like the All in One 2 before it it’s a fairly basic and dull product on the surface, but it does the job and if you need a 3.25” hard drive enclosure for swapping SATA drives in and out of then the MB672 will get the job done easily and quickly.

Verdict: Not exactly earth shattering as a product or design, but it's hard to fault and great for annoying everyone else in the office.