Final Thoughts
ICY DOCK’s ICYCube MB561U3S-4S 4 Bay External HDD Enclosure is one of the more attractive 4-bay units out there. The white and silver version looks great and actually matches up pretty well to Apple’s products. If the white is not your thing then they do offer the unit in all black as well. On top of good looks the unit is made of all aluminum and the drive bays themselves are metal so you know the unit will not break easily.
While you will find a whole bunch of 2-bay external hard drive enclosures, 4-bay units are a little harder to come by. With 4 bays that really gives you an enormous amount of storage space and room to expand if you only have a couple of drives. Currently 6 TB drives are the largest out there so if you fully loaded this enclosure up you could have 24 TB of storage! That sure is a lot! This drive also supports 2.5-inch drives so you could load it up with SSDs.
The enclosure has two different connection options. First you have USB 3.0, which is extremely fast and easy to use. Secondly you have eSATA which gives you great speed and a few different RAID options. If you are using eSATA you can setup a single big disk (JBOD), you can stripe your drives (RAID 0) for increased speeds or you can mirror your drives (RAID 1) for redundancy. While you can do software RAID using eSATA there is no built in raid on the unit itself. Therefor with USB 3.0 there are no RAID options at all.
Another thing I liked about this unit is how easy it was to setup. If you know how to use a screwdriver you can get this unit setup in a matter of minutes. Once you have your drives installed all you have to do is plug in power and either the USB or eSATA connection and you are good to go. Windows will automatically detect the device.
Right now the MB561U3S-4S is selling for around $185 at my favorite online retailer. At that price it is one of the more expensive 4-bay external hard drive enclosures out there, but given the quality I believe that the price is justified. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ICY DOCK ICYCube MB561U3S-4S 4 Bay External HDD Enclosure a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Stylish design
– Made with quality materials
– Easy setup
– USB 3.0 and eSATA connectivity
Cons:
– No built in RAID
