Warranty, Pricing, and Conclusion
Warranty
The ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB993SK-B and MB998SP-B (and virtually every other ToughArmor branded product) ships with a 3-year warranty.
Pricing
MB993SK-B – $65 (Newegg) (Amazon)
MB998SP-B – $120 (Newegg) (Amazon)
ICY DOCK is currently running an ‘April Promotion’, where they are offering cash back on purchases of a lot of their models (including $15 off of the MB998SP-B).
Conclusion
So there you have it. Two extremely durable hot swap bays that fit the maximum number of 2.5” SATA devices into those unused 5.25” and 3.5” bays. The only quibbles I have is that pricing is a bit high, and trhe 3-bay unit requires 4-pin power. Despite the minor issues, these are high-quality products with excellent fit and finish, all backed by a 3-year warranty. For anyone that needs to fit multiple 2.5" SSDs into either a 5.25" or 3.5" bay, the MB998SP-B and MB993SK-B are the best tools for that job!
There’s not much real competition in this space. The only guys I’ve seen come close are StarTech.com, and while their build quality was also good, they just don’t scale up to the numbers of drives or level of durability seen in these ICY DOCK ToughArmor parts. That leaves ToughArmor as getting my Editor's Choice for this particular application.
Did you do any extensive
Did you do any extensive testing of SSDs in these? I had no end of trouble with another model of ICY DOCK dropping drives in such a way as to cause the whole machine to hard lock. (Both mirrored and non-raided drives.) I had to replace the unit with a 4 bay Super Micro that worked flawlessly.
Super Micro’s
Super Micro’s offerings.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/mobileRack/
The offerings in those are a
The offerings in those are a bit different, mainly the size the bays take up. The Icydock product in the review takes up less space than those in those links.
I put a couple of hours on
I put a couple of hours on both of them without issue. Since there is no real logic in these, dropouts might have been caused by a weak / long SATA cable or controller. I've seen that sort of thing with other docking solutions in the past.
Hopefully they just improved
Hopefully they just improved these models over past models. I guess I didn’t feel the need to go through all the troubleshooting steps but the setup didn’t start working until I took the ICY DOCK out of the equation. The same drives and cables worked properly with another enclosure but the ICY DOCK didn’t work with different cables.
Have you tried contacting Icy
Have you tried contacting Icy Dock tech support? They helped me out when I had an issue with one of their products and stand by their warranty.
Hell yes!
Hell yes!
I have couple of those 8 bay
I have couple of those 8 bay filled with SSDs. Couldn’t be happier.
If you want to use fans, replace the default set with something less noisy. Standard fans spin up to 4800 rpms, used 2800 rps Noiseblockers as a replacement.
Are we at the point where we
Are we at the point where we can use 2.5″ HDD’s in things like this for a home server? It sure would let me use a much smaller case.
That was my first thought as
That was my first thought as well. I’d be curious as to the heat, power, and noise from 8 2.5″ HDDs fully loaded. For a home server, the sequential performance for a set of RAIDed drives in an enclosure like this would certainly exceed gigabit ethernet and might be a nice option. Unfortunately the overall capacity and capacity per dollar both land somewhere between SSD and 3.5″ HDD pricing. Also 2.5″ HDDs still seem to be optimized for laptop use — I haven’t seen a “NAS” drive in that form factor.
Which is a shame. I recall Google has proposed a new form factor for spinning disks optimized for mass storage that used smaller platters but more of them. The closest match appears to be 2.5″ drives in the thicker 15mm variants, but those come with high enterprise price tags and usually SAS connections.
For some reason I thought
For some reason I thought 2.5″ drives had reached larger capacities but it looks like they top out at 2TB and cost about 50% more than their 3.5″ counter-parts. I guess I’ll just continue dreaming about using something like this filled with SSDs.
Before you purchase the 8-bay
Before you purchase the 8-bay unit,
take a look at the Reviews at newegg.com .
We bought one recently, and that newegg review
was correct about the “squeeze” you can expect
with the SATA power connectors:
the “straight-in style” power connectors are
highly recommended. Under the “fair use” doctrine,
I’ll just quote that one important paragraph,
because we also confirmed the following “Con”
(and we already had the “straight” style):
Carney K. writes:
“Cons: Poorly thought out SATA power connectors. Quite a few power supplies on the market use the daisy-chain style SATA power connectors. This is only (easily) compatible with the straight style. The problem with a daisy chained connector is the extra width required since the cord enters and exits the SATA connector at an angle. Adding insult to injury, after plugging in the first connector, you have to twist the cable 180 degrees, and flip the connector another 180 degrees since they did not position the keyed edge in the same direction for both SATA power connectors. Also, the fans block the full-seating of this style. Just something to beware of on an otherwise great product. If you have the daisy-chain style SATA power connectors from your PSU, you may want simple extensions or adapters to avoid the acrobatics.”
And, I would also add that you should also
install all cabling while the 8-bay enclosure
is OUTSIDE the chassis: this is so, because
the fan wires create a pretty tight situation
around the SATA ports, and you’ll be able to
see what’s going on much easier while the
enclosure is outside the chassis.
Aside from the above, our 4 new Samsung 850 SSDs
are humming along nicely, and this upgrade
means that our 12GB ramdisk is saved and restored
about three times faster than our four aging
15,000 rpm Hitachi SAS HDDs (also in RAID-0).
sigh, if only ssds were
sigh, if only ssds were around the price per gigabyte of hard drives you could have an amazing RAID array in a very compact form factor
oh well, i can wait
Has anybody done stress
Has anybody done stress testing with 8x HDDs in there? I think the drives might all overheat, since this is so dense.