ICY DOCK ICYCube MB561U3S-4S 4 Bay External HDD Enclosure Review

Usage & Testing
As I said you can connect these drives via USB 3.0 or eSATA. I went with USB 3.0 first. Unlike eSATA with USB 3.0 we cannot do any type of software RAID within Windows so we will only be able to test single drives. Once you connect the enclosure Windows will automatically recognize it, much like any USB device. You then can easily format your drives. Here are all four drives formatted and ready to be used.

single

On the eSATA end you can do software RAID and Spanned volumes via Windows quite easily. When you set up a spanned volume you just have one big drive.

spanned

You can also setup RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). RAID 0 will give you a performance boost and RAID 1 will give you data redundancy.

We will be using ATTO Disk Benchmark to speed test our drives inside the enclosure. For reference the 6 TB WD Red drive has a maximum transfer speed of 175 MB/s.

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