Icy Dock ICYRaid MB662U3-2S Review

Test Setup

As we've not really looked at a similar product recently, we used our current SSD test rig and benchmarks for the ICYRaid MB662U3-2S. The rig consists of an Asus Maximus V Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i5 3570K running at 4.2GHz as well as two modules of Corsair 4GB 2,400MHz DDR3 memory. We've used the synthetic benchmarks AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark to test for sequential performance, CrystalDiskMark again to test random performance, and finally the Secondary Storage test in PCMark 7 to simulate workloads closer to real world scenarios.

Though the Icy Dock enclosure doesn't officially support SSDs, we managed to fit inside it one of the fastest SSDs we've ever seen, a Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB, in order to test the speed limits of the USB controller. We also tested the Icy Dock with this SSD via a USB 2.0 interface to highlight the potential speed difference between the two specifications.


For the hard drive tests, we used two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drives, as RAID scenarios are optimised with identical drives. We first ran our benchmarks on a single drive and a RAID 0 set-up mounted internally to our Asus Maximus V Extreme via SATA 6Gbps. These tests will allow us to compare the enclosure's performance with the speeds achievable in desktop solutions.

Finally, with the two hard drives installed in the USB 3.0 connected enclosure, we ran our benchmarks on both drives individually in JBOD mode to test single drive performance, as well as on the 2TB and 1TB volumes created by the RAID 0 and RAID 1 settings respectively. It is these tests that are marked in bold below and red in the graphs.

Internal Asus Maximus V Extreme tests

• 1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, SATA 6bps
  
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, RAID 0, SATA 6Gbps

External Icy Dock ICYRaid MB662U3-2S tests

• 1 x Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB, USB 3
  
• 1 x Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB, USB 2
  
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, JBOD, USB 3 (Drive 1)
  
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, JBOD, USB 3 (Drive 2)
  
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, RAID 0, USB 3
  
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, RAID 1, USB 3