Image from Wikipedia My Icy Dock 5-in-3 SATAII/Icy+Dock+MB-455SPF+3.5’‘+SATA+?productId=23605) cage arrived today from Aria “Aria (manga)”). I was quite excited, and wanted to fit it straight away. I shut my computer down, took the case apart and set about fitting it. The first issue I came across was that the drive rails for my Antec P180 case would not fit properly - I had to fit only the bottom to, as fitting all three meant that they were all too close together to squeeze on the P180’s rails. Once I had this sorted, I set about trying to fit the power and data cables. ARGH! :@ There just wasn’t enough space! And to make things worse, the connectors on the back of the cage were the wrong way round for the L-shaped SATA cables (see image) to fit! After over an hours struggling, swearing, plugging, unplugging and general annoyance, I finally got the damned thing into my case. Breathing a sigh of relief, I set about the long task of attaching my drives to the mounting rails of the cage. I then slotted them in, and rebooted.

WOW!

WHAT THE HELL?!

THATS SO NOISY!

They rattled like anything. I quickly turned the machine off, tightened (really really overtightened, if you ask me!) the screws as much as I could, and then slipped the drives back in and powered up. This time the rattle was gone, but it was still very noisy from all the vibrations. The Icy Dock does not have any anti-vibration built in, making it much noisier than I was used to (I normally mount “Mount (computing)”) the drives using the rubber gromits that come with the P180 case). The fan was also very noisy, so much so that I had to change the setting on the back to 55oC instead of 45oC for the warning temperature.

Credit where credits due, the cage does keep my drives nice and cool, and it is very helpful to be able to see the individual hard drive status LEDs. It also have the obvious advantage of being able to quickly and easily swap a drive in and out in the event of a disk failure, without all the effort of having to go inside your case (and possibly knock a cable out of another disk drive without realising!).

Generally, though, I would sum up my feelings thus:

I recommend NOT buying an Icy Dock 5-in-3 SATA cage.Was hard to install&my computer is *miles* louder now+resonates.Pretty lights though…

By the way, this is the first post that I have written with Zemanta (my first “zemified” post). I’m quite impressed at its ease of use, and I will continue to use it for that reason. Towards the beginning of writing a post the articles it brings up tend to be quite random though… what does this post have to do with celebrity babies, for example? I really like the gallery feature though, and the links are especially helpful (though I am surprised that “Zemanta” isn’t among the link detection)! Great work, guys!