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PCRules.com - Icy Box
IB-350U-BL
Review by
Alex McHardy |
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When the Icy Box arrived at my
door I was certainly intrigued as to just what it does and
what you would use it for. The rather interestingly named
Icy Box is in fact an external HDD housing that plugs
straight in via a USB 2.0 cable on this particular model. It
does in fact come in five different flavours each with their
own methods of connectivity which will all be fully
explained at the end of the review.
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The product comes packaged in a fairly attractive box that
shows off the shininess of the Icy Box and would certainly
catch your attention amongst the other products competing
for your custom. Its claim to be “extreme noiseless” is
appealing and also a rather humorous German to English
translation.
Inside the box you’ll find the unit itself along with a
power lead and adaptor, USB 2.0 cable, stand for holding the
unit vertically, a driver disk and some simple set up
instructions. |
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As you would expect the
installation was extremely straight forward. Thumbscrews
are used for holding the aluminium plates to the unit
for easy access and just two screws are needed to hold
the drive in place. Through Windows XP the drive was
detected as soon as it was plugged in and assigned a
drive letter. Installation through 98 SE was easily
achieved by using the driver disk provided.
Once up and running I was pleasantly surprised to see
the Icy Box flashing with both read and write activity
in all its lovely blueness. With USB 2.0 supporting data
transfer speeds up to a maximum of 480Mb/s you’re
certainly not going to find any sort of bottleneck when
transferring data and performed brilliantly in tests.
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When
it comes to uses for the Icy Box, there’s more than
plenty. It’s a great solution for backup needs and
certainly a lot more handy than removing and
reinstalling HDD’s out of different cases and the added
bonus of PC and Mac compatibility makes data transfer
between the two simple.
As mentioned earlier in the review the unit is available
in a wide variety of connectivity options, here’s the
five different versions offered:
IB-350U: IDE HDD to USB 2.0
IB-350U-BL: IDE HDD to USB 2.0 with Blue Light
IB-350UE-BL: IDE HDD to USB 2.0 & IEEE1394 with Blue
Light
IB-350US: IDE HDD to USB 2.0& SATA
This review was kindly sponsored by:
www.nanopoint.co.uk
The Icy Box is available to buy at:
www.thecoolingshop.co.uk
www.micro-logic.com
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Quality: |
9/10
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The unit looked stunning sitting on my desk and the
high standard of build quality left me happy in the
knowledge my HDD was safe. |
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Price: |
8/10
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At
about £30 it’s only a little pricier than other
similar products of lower quality. Great value for
money overall. |
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Installation: |
10/10
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Very simple, just plug it all in and away you go. It
really is that easy. |
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Compatibility: |
9/10 |
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Will work on just about all machines with a USB
port, either PC or Mac. It also supports IDE ATA
100/133 including drives over 250Gb. |
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Performance : |
9/10
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The box performs really well as long as it isn’t
used on USB 1.1. It just becomes agonisingly slow,
no fault of the Icy Box just the limitations of USB
1.1 |
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Overall
: 45/50
The Icy
Box serves as a great looking, great
performing external HDD enclosure all at
great value for money. Definitely
recommended. |
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