ICYRaid MB662U3-2S Dual bay SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAID Enclosure
First lets take a look at the rear, as that is where the most is happening on the ICYRaid:
Starting up top, note the thumb wheel to the right of the Sunon MAGLEV fan. This lets you dial down the speed to nearly inaudible levels. Moving down we see a selector switch for JBOD, Big, RAID-0, and RAID-1 modes. Under that switch is a reset button that must be pressed (with the unit on) to apply the change made by the switch. USB 3.0, power supply, power switch, and Kensington lock port are self explanatory. At the bottom left is a pair of DIP switches which allow selection of power save mode and front panel LED indication.
A quick peek at some of the internal logic. Note the two arms reaching up from the bottom. Those help push the drive out of the enclosure as the front door is swing open. The left door was closed in this photo, while the right door was open. Here is a look at drive insertion from the outside:
With a drive inserted and active, and with the doors cracked open to better see the indicators, here's what they look like:
The left indicator is noting that no drive is present (red), while the right indicator is lit (white) indicating HDD access is taking place. The indicator is off is no access is taking place. Here is a look at the indicators with the doors closed:
Performance
For performance testing we checked out a few configurations. First up is a single WD Red 6TB in JOBD mode:
Note that 'Big Disk' mode simply appends one disk to the other, so ATTO performance results will be similar for that case.
Next we added a second WD Red 6TB and switched over to RAID-1 (mirror) mode:
When mirroring, we see a slight hit to write speeds and a slight boost to read speeds. This is to be expected, but we would have liked to see better read performance (intelligent RAID-1 implementations will stripe reads as if the drives were in a RAID-0, doubling performance. The simple RAID implementation of the ICYRaid does not implement this trick.
Next up is RAID-0:
When directly striping data across two drives, we see a rough doubling of throughput, which is expected. It also shows that the USB chipset of the ICYRaid is reasonably fast even though it is not UASP enabled.
Next we tested ultimate throughput with a single Samsung 850 Pro SSD accessed via JBOD mode:
Speeds were not as high as we would have liked to see here, apparently saturating the RAID chipset / USB 3.0 interface at just under 300 MB/sec. It almost looks like SATA 2 speeds were negotiated, which would be the likely explanation as our RAID-0 results were higher than this single SSD result. The ICYRaid was not designed with 2.5" SSDs in mind, however, and HDDs rarely exceed 1.5 Gbps speeds. So long as you are using HDDs, the ICYRaid should not be much of a bottle neck (lack of UASP aside, that is).
UASP is interesting. How do
UASP is interesting. How do they increase throughput? By lowering overhead? 5 Gb/s translates to 625 MB/s. Even with the fastest 2.5″ drive in the world, it managed to cap at 440 MB/s at a not practical high Q depth.
I remember PCIe Gen 1 and 2 had a 20% overhead due to poor encoding. They decreased the overhead to roughly 1.5% with better encoding algorithms. That, of course, increases power consumption.
Can’t they do something similar to that with USB? I understand it has to jump through more hoops to get to the processor since it’s not a direct bridge like PCIe 3.0 (All Intel CPUs, some AMD CPUS) is but surely they can do better than that.
Same story with SATA 3. 750 MB/s theoretical throughput but in practice it hardly ever goes over ~550 MB/s. That’s 35% overhead.
Future SoCs from Intel will integrate PCH into the die, eliminating the need for DMI. Maybe then we’ll see more efficient data transfer rates.
I looked at these today,
I looked at these today, before I knew you had done a review Allyn,
Bit too pricy for me though,so I poped these into my whish list instead
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00JX7XTOK/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005OFID5A/
Sorry it’s UK, and one is unavailable, but it’s around half the price of the MB662U3-2S
Have you had any experience of ORICO?
EDIT:
Actually reading around, they seem a little low quality, however I just managed to snag “ORICO 6619US3” a single docking station for £6.01 inc del from amazon, so will try that out.