Power Consumption

Compared to a complete Home Theatre PC, the Icy Box uses next to no power and when it's not in use the hard drive automatically spins down after a few minutes. This cuts the power use in half, not that it was huge to begin with when it idles at just 13W.

Bearing in mind that depending on what hard drive you use will vary these values by a few watts either way. Typically turning on the hard drive again causes the system to suck about 30-35W for 10 seconds or so, but overall it’s exceptionally low power.

Playing back either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 video the power consumption jumped just 2W to 15W – something that's hardly going to make a noticeable dent in your power bill.

Conclusions

When we first saw the Icy Box we thought it had excellent potential – an external hard drive enclosure with media playback capabilities: awesome! However when we came to use it we realised that all is not as good as it would first seem – what it’s really, really missing is a network socket. It either sits under your TV or by your PC – it can’t be in both places at once. If you’ve got it plugged into both – why not just plug the PC directly into the TV and use a much cheaper external drive for storage instead?

Currently, when you want to update the Icy Box to watch something new you’re invariably unplugging it and moving it about – this becomes a hassle and over time it'll start to grow into a chore. You can’t copy things across using a USB memory key either; you have to pair it with a whole PC or notebook.

If you want a simple device that anyone in the family can use, as long as you stay within the confides of the formats it supports, then all is great. If you’re constrained by power use or size the Icy Box MP-303S-B is certainly a device worth considering, or perhaps you’re a student and want to take all your DVDs with you when you leave for university? A 500GB hard drive will cost another £50-to-£60 on top of the unit and, even though the initial time investment for ripping and copying is quite considerable, it’ll store about 60 discs! That’s a huge space saving, plus, if it gets stolen all your discs are stored safely elsewhere.

When we came to sit down and discuss what else there is on the market it’s actually surprising how many different solutions we came up with: for starters there’s the home theatre PC – this is far more customisable but uses more power and costs a lot more. Next there’s the PS3 with its excellent interface – it's also very quiet but it can’t play back everything and again costs more. The Xbox 360 is noisier, but cheaper than the PS3 and while the interface isn’t as good as the former, it does provide the very useful Media Extender function. This is not including the fact both the PS3 and Xbox 360 add value as games consoles.

Then there are all the DivX-supporting DVD players on the market, obviously a hard drive offers a far greater capacity than DVD but some offer a USB port so you can plug in a USB memory key (or hard drive) filled with media. If you’re going to go to the trouble of filling something with media to watch or listen to, a finger sized USB stick that requires no extra power is infinitely more practical than moving the Icy Box.

There are other units that have a network socket, so they don’t even need this physical transfer and instead just need to be pointed in the right direction. The problems we’ve heard from people that have used them is skipping or buffering problems if the network usage is high, or if the host machine is thrashing the hard drive. No solution is perfect – it depends on which compromise you’d find easier to live with.

Value

On its own the Icy Box is £81.60 and you can pair it with a 160GB for £32.89, but the Icy Box is meant to be your digital hub. Since you can’t stream from other devices we’d only consider pairing it with the best price-to-space ratio currently available from a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint hard drive. Together this comes to £137.41, without the shipping costs of both parts. That’s clearly a significant investment.

For £160 you can now buy an Xbox 360 Arcade, a 40GB PS3 is £285 and we recently specced up an entire, very capable home theatre PC for just under £300.

For £95 you can buy a Buffalo LinkTheater – this supports the same formats as the Icy Box but instead you can stream media from any number of devices instead of storing it directly. There's even the Toshiba SD-370E DVD player that can not only also play DivX, but it also has an HDMI output and it’ll upscale SD content to HD resolutions. For £44 this is quite a bargain.

Final Thoughts

We have to respect the Icy Box IB-MP303S-B for doing exactly what it says on the tin, but it’s certainly nothing special. The lack of extra cables for decent video quality and a network port really means it loses out to other solutions. Simply put, there are too many other, more viable alternatives on the market for the cost of a decent hard drive and the Icy Box. It’s a nice idea that will suit a few people, but the MP303S is not something that demands considerable attention from many.

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