Tagan Icy Box JBOD Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Packaging & Accessories

The box which the Icy Box comes in is certainly eye catching. With its black and cyan cold colour scheme and its big, bold and nearly eye-searing ultra white font it really does catch the eye from a distance. Heck you can READ the words ICY BOX which are plastered on the top from a loooong ways off. If there is one thing that I like it’s a color scheme which not only works but also helps to subliminally reinforce the core ideals of the product which it is selling. In this case the cool or even down right cold color scheme probably wouldn't work to well if your trying to sell a line call "RedHots!" but for a product line which is called “Icy Box” the connotations of subzero temperatures that this light cyan on black scheme conjure up works amazingly well.


The box itself is also a veritable fountain of information and contains all the necessary information to help a first time buyer make his/her decision. It is just too bad none of this information on the back of the box is in English! You can read all about its wonderful specifications in six different languages but not one of them is ENGLISH. To find the English specs you have to read the side of the box, which is very counter-intuitive to say the least.


When you do open the box up you are greeted to a very good packaging scheme which is darn near disaster proof. The enclosure itself is snuggled between to large pieces of low density Styrofoam protectors which are nearly the full length and height of the box. This allows the enclosure to actually float in the center of the box keeping it safe from all but the most destructive of accidents.


The accessories which come with this are very complete and are actually pretty impressive. You of course get the ubiquitous power brick (though this one is on the smaller side), two keys for opening the front doors (more on this later in the review), a USB cable, and a software CD. The CD with backup software is what takes this accessory list to the next level and elevates it from ordinary to above average. For its intended price range it was very nice to see Tagan included free one touch backup software.

The only potential issue with this software is that it is Windows only and this may actually alienate a certain percentage of its potential clientele. After all, no one likes getting goodies that they can't use on their computer without installing a different OS first. To them it would be a lot like waking up on Christmas morning only to find that Santa Clause left you boring school cloths.

Overall the Icy Box leaves one with a fairly decent first impression and there really is only one issue which reduces it from a great first impression to merely a decent one. That issue being the female model on the front of the box. Don't get me wrong; I'm a man I like women and like pictures of women (as my multi-Gigabyte collection can attest too), but I represent only half the market. I don't think a woman would be too impressed with the overt misogynistic conations of the advertising scheme. Even if most women do not take offense to it, as an older tech geek I have learned that if a company has use sex to sell its product it usually means it may not be the best product to buy. There have been exceptions to this in the past and hopefully the Icy Box IB-3220STU is one of them.