Customer Reviews

ICY DOCK MB559US-1S External 3.5" eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was very surprised at how cool my drive stays. It never gets warmer than what a normal person's skin feels to the touch while resting. My biggest concern was heat dissipation since I would be keeping this unit on 24/7.

What makes it even better is the free extra tray that I received via the rebate!

For the price it is a very good value. Easily one of the best looking and best made (materials are top notch) enclosures I've ever seen. Most enclosures are cheap looking and have poor tactile feel, but not this unit.

I purchased this item to use with a Mac Pro after adding the Newer eSATA extender cable which gave me two SATA ports out the back. As a result I have my fastest backup capacity ever...faster than FireWire 800. The ICY DOCK was simple to install, just 6 screws on the tray and slip tie drive in place. A restart is required for the eSATA connector to mount the drive and it operates exactly as an internal drive. On the Mac if you wanted to turn the drive off without shutting down the computer I just use the Disk Utility.app to unmount the drive and turn it off. The USB is hot swappable plug and play. There were no problems or issues encountered in using this drive enclosure. A handy strategy would be to purchase extra drive trays (sleds) and be able to mount different drives. I'd say this is a very good product, cleverly designed and reasonably priced.

I bought this to put my 500gb sata2 seagate 7200rpm hard drive and it rocks. Assembly was a nobrainer without even needing the instructions! Testing the heat i left it on for like 2 days straight and all and the enclosure was barely warm. This is a passive enclosure, no fans and the white light is neat. You can buy replacement cartridges as the enclosure is hotswappable via usb, esata or firewire.

5 stars for build and looks. 5 stars for performance on a non-Mac system.

Unfortunately this enclosure is most definitely not compatible with OS X versions higher than 10.5. From what I've been able to determine during the course of my research is that Mac OS X versions higher than 10.5 will not 'allow' the use of a dual eSATA/USB enclosure for reasons unknown to me. Attaching the enclosure to my MacBook Pro produced an immediate kernel panic, whether via eSATA or USB. Apparently 10.5 has the same issue but is 'more forgiving' and will usually not kernel panic with the use of a dual eSATA/USB enclosure but I can't confirm this from personal experience.

I tried pretty much every recommendation that I found in regards to removing and installing the Silicon Image drivers. I did all of the usual checks to make sure the problem wasn't caused by something else; hard disk check, tried another enclosure, tried another computer. The hard disk worked fine in this enclosure and in another eSATA/USB enclosure on a non-OS X system (Windows XP with MacDrive).

I have been unable to find a suitable solution anywhere online. There are discussions about this problem on the Apple web site dating way back to 2007 but so far no solution.

I'm a big fan of the Icy Dock enclosures. They are solid and well constructed. I have used two different models at work for the past few years. The problem I have had is with eSATA. On my Dell OptiPlex 755 mini-tower, if I use the Icy Dock with the eSATA port, and a Western Digital Black 1 TB drive, it will occasionally lock-up my machine. If I run the drive as a second internal drive, or with the USB cable on the Icy Dock, I have no issues. Only the eSATA causes the problem. If I had another enclosure I could figure out if it was the Dell or the enclosure.

I've owned this Icy Dock MB559US-1S External 3.5" eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure for over two years now. It's an excellent add-on for backing up a computer system as the eSATA connection lets you back up at full speed instead of being limited by the USB conenction speed. Also, being fanless, it's fairly quite (you can still hear the drive, but at least there's no fan adding to it). Surprisingly, the drives run fairly cool in it. The unit is sturdy, well-made, and nice-looking. Because of the tiny screws used to attach the drive to the drive tray, I'd definitely recommend buying the Extra Hard Drive Tray. I rate this an Excellent 5 stars out of 5.

BTW: if you're interested in an enclosure that doesn't need drive trays and you can situate it close to your computer, take a look at the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station.

This hard drive enclosure works great and was so surprizingly easy to install the hard drive, I couldn't believe how easy it was and I don't do installs of hardware on my PC so I don't know much about installing this kind of thing. I also purchased the Western Digital WD3200KSRTL Caviar 320 GB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive to go along with this and they work wonderfully together. Also the usb connection is automatically detected by winXP.

This is an excellent item. Very sleek, slim, precision engineered, and it comes with absolutely everything you need. Definitely worth the extra money.

Purchased MB559US-1S External for working w/ external SATA drives. It's a decent enclosure, however it does have some issues -- particularly with the eSATA.

My system:
ICY DOCK w/ WD 2TB drive > Syba II eSATA Expresscard > Toshiba P200 laptop w/ Vista Ultimate 32-bit OS

Issues:
-- eSATA hangs the OS --
Attempting to use eSATA caused the OS to become unresponsive -- or if lucky very marginally responsive. Most cases required turning off or physically unplugging the eSATA connection to the enclosure before I could reboot the system. USB on the other hand seems to work fine. Unfortunately part of the reason that this enclosure was chosen was for the eSATA so this is disappointing. The expresscard is not the issue as the same setup connects to a Wiebetech Ultradock via eSATA without problems.

To be fair, I have an inquiry w/ Icy Dock to determine if there are possible workarounds for the eSATA issue.

-- Power Connection Not Solid --
There are times when powering up the enclosure it appears that the connector is either not solidly connected (wiggling powers on/off) or there is another issue with the backplane. The light does not always come on in this case as you might expect it to. I'm not moving the drive around a lot so this isn't quite as much of an issue for me as it would be for someone who does.

-- eSATA Does Not "Safely Remove" --
When used with an HP desktop the enclosure cannot be 'safely removed' and the system must be powered down before turning the enclosure off.

Somewhere I had read that the eSATA issues may be the result of the backplane being 'SATA' versus true 'eSATA' however I am not sure if this is the case.

Even so, it still is a decent enclosure however as noted it has definite issues for the 2 purchased.

Seems like such a great idea... but my icydoc burned out after one year.

And even when it was working, screwing each sata into the sled before inserting it in the housing defeats the purpose. I'm going to try one of the sata docks this time.