Tagan Icy Box JBOD Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Performance Testing

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed that you are likely to experience with these enclosures.


While at first glance it may seem that there is a huge, nay, gaping chasm of a difference between the Icy Box and the other enclosures, as with most things it really isn’t that big of a difference. In most real world situations burst speed does not matter (except for extremely small files) and a variance of 1.6MBs is not a big deal. Yes the Icy Box is not the fastest of the bunch, but honestly if speed is your main priority you are much better off with eSATA or even a FireWire 800 equipped enclosure.


Random Access Time

Once again, HDTach was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive.


13.4 milliseconds of latency means this enclosure only adds .2ms latency. This is obviously a very good thing. Both the Icy Box and the BlacX really do outclass the MediaSonic USB enclosure when it comes to latency.


ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.


Just as we have seen in the past, the real limiting factor of any modern enclosure is the USB interface. Darn near any modern day chipset can easily saturate aging USB 2.0 standard and one can only hope either USB 3.0 comes out soon or eSATA starts to become more popular.


SIS

This test was run with the removable storage benchmark in Sandra XII Standard. All of the scores are calculated in operations per second and have been averaged out from the scores of 4 test runs.


While there is over a thousand points of difference between the Icy Box and the BlacX this is a neglible amount; however a five thousand point difference is significant. Just as we saw in the BlacX review, the MediaSonic’s Oxford chipset continues to dominate the SiSoft Sandra test results.


EXTENDED RUNTIME TESTING:

Where these units are marketed towards the home environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random insertion and removal and random requests for data. To test how robust this unit is, and how well the active cooling would work, the Icy Box was subjected to a 48 hour torture session. During this time the hard drive was inserted and removed 40 times (and yes we did count the number), the hard drive was instructed to do a hard format and was filled and emptied numerous times.

After 48hrs of nonstop use the Seagate 7200.10, while getting warm, was not anywhere close to being in danger of overheating. Its removal and insertion was just as easy the last time as the first and unlike some models we have tested in the past we would not hesitate to recommend you use and hard drive you wish (even if the hot running WD Raptor, or any other hot running hard drive) with this enclosure.