Icy Dock MB453

Not too long ago RAID was the territory of servers and uber geeks. You had to buy either an add in card or a mobo with a raid chip soldered on and even then unless you went with a high dollar add in SCSI card you were generally limited to RAID -0 or RAID -1 or combinations of these. RAID -5 was generally left to servers requiring excellent performance and 100% uptime. "What’s RAID -5?" I can hear some of you asking, well RAID -5 is a setup that takes your data and stripes and mirrors it across three drives. It uses 66% of each drive’s overall size to do this so you end up with an array that’s the total size of two of the three drives.

This allows you to lose one drive with Windows running and still keep the OS up and running and be able to rebuild the array from within Windows. To do this requires a hot swappable HDD cage for each drive so you can pop the offending drive out and slap a new one in with the PC running.

This is where ICY DOCK fits in. ICY DOCK has long been offering drive bay enclosures but recently they began offering hot swappable SATA versions. One of these is tailor made for RAID -5, the MB453. The MB453 is a three SATA drive enclosure that fits into 2-5.25" bays. Let’s take a quick look at what ICY DOCK has to say about the MB453.

Product Description

Full aluminum built cooling body constructed to fit three drives within a two (5.25”) bay fitting, the MB453 Series follows the tradition of industrial systems’ needs for stability, durability, toughness and high sensitivities for mass storage operating conditions. It’s equipped with a hot swappable fan that may be detached if confined by depth limitations when integrated, or if replacement is necessary.Our removable fan requires no tools or wiring, simply swap with a new fan and back to operation! It is space saving and user friendly for industrialized system solutions.

Suggested Applications

Storage drives expansion and enabling drive maintenance to industrial PC, server, and various storage system applications.

Product Features
• Drive Fit : 3 x 3.5"
• Hot Swappable SATA I or II
• Device Fit : 2 x 5.25" device bays
• Internal drive security, exchangeability, expandability and maintenance capabilities
• Compact and space saving for multiple drive fit
• Durable aluminum built cooling
• Huge warm air outtake fan cooling that’s detachable
• Advanced drive monitoring system built internally w/ visual & audio indicators

Don’t get the wrong idea, this is perfect for the enthusiast as well as the professional. If you’ve ever dabbled with RAID you can see where this would be immensely beneficial to you.

Let’s take a look at the MB453 shall we?

The MB453 comes securely packaged in an expanded foam cradle. It’d take a really incompetent delivery person to put the hurt on this beauty.