ICY DOCK MB974SP-B Internal 4 in 3 SATA Review

👤by Alex Hull Comments 📅18-04-11
Installation


That’s not flush...


Sliding the unit into the case is technically as straightforward as any other 5.25” device, and depending on your case, you may have the choice of a tool-less installation here. There are no considerations for external vibration dampening, but this is not something usually seen in 5.25” devices, perhaps somewhat surprisingly. However, as seen above, we meet our first real issue here. Although the unit is of comparable length to an optical drive (+the cooling fan) at 210mm, it interferes with long graphics cards and cables, depending on your case size and layout. There are also quite a few cables to deal with - in total, two power connections, five SATA connections and a USB header.


Some re-arrangement is in order as there’s little room to play with


There’s not much else to describe this cable management challenge other than chaotic, especially with longer cables than necessary, as in a typical case the routing is going to be a lot shorter than usual. You can also see there is next to no clearance to the graphics card, an AMD Radeon HD 5870 at 28cm. I must stress, these limitations strongly depend on the case you’re using, so your experience may vary. Do the measurements first.


Aren’t they supposed to line up?


And so we now meet the second issue encountered – mounting the whole module inside the 5.25” drive bays. Only two of the screw holes on each side could be screwed in, resulting in some unpleasant metallic vibrations being heard on boot of the drives. As you can see, not many of the large number of screw holes actually line up well in this case, and I can only assume this is a fairly standard design, at least for Lian Li cases. Frankly, this discrepancy is quite baffling, as if the screw pitch is off consistently in other cases as well, this is a real howler of an oversight. This is something I intend to test soon, and will update this article with the results.


The unit installed into a Lian Li V1000 Plus II case


Finally installed, the internal aluminium finish matches the case the unit has been installed into here, but for cases with black internals it’s not going to look perfectly integrated. This is a small point of aesthetics, but for those with performance machines who like to showcase the internals, via a window or similar, it’s a necessary consideration. As for the externals, as shown above, I was pleasantly surprised that the black colour is indeed quite black, unlike some devices with plastic fascias, which can appear a dull grey.


HDDs slide into the front quite effortlessly


Depressing the button and pulling back the cover on the front of each drive bay opens it up for installation of a drive. Drives then slide into the device and are locked into place by pushing the front cover back and locking it back into position. Drives can then be turned on by depressing the LED/switch, at which point it behaves as a normal drive would once turned on. Note that hot-swap functionality will require a compatible motherboard with AHCI support, of which almost every new motherboard has supported for a number of years now. You’ll also need to be running the drives in AHCI mode. There are plenty of guides on the internet to do this with recent operating systems, and with Windows 7 it can be done without reinstalling the whole operating system.
It may not be so obvious to grasp the installation method at first, so here is a short video illustrating how it’s done:

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As you can see, swapping and removal of drives is very simple, and the design is totally tool-less and there are no mounting drives into caddies or installing screws, you simply slide in a bare drive. ICY DOCK could not have made this simpler and I really think this is a great feature that sets it apart from the crowd.

One observation however, is that the locking mechanism and doors are not as solid as you may expect. Also, when installing a drive, sometimes the door above can pop open (though this does not switch off any installed drives immediately by design). In addition to this, one of the doors was often stubborn to open. So despite the professional finish, the build quality of the mechanism, although functional, is disappointing for a product in this price range.


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