Icy Dock MB973SP-B Optimizes HDD System Performance

Name brand gaming cases such as Antec Nine Hundread, Thermaltake Armor+MX, and COOLER MASTER RC-690-KKN1-GP there are many different features that make them better than your basic beige case. Besides the fancy lights and big cooling fans there are always a couple of unused 5.25" bays on the front of the case.

With the Icy Dock MB973SP-B this takes advantage of the unused 5.25" bays and gives performance with out sacrificing the looks of the gaming case. With the prices of hard drives dropping you may have a couple extra hard drives lying around not being utilized and have nowhere to store them. If that’s the case, the MB973SP-B is the internal hard drive enclosure for you. It not only lets you store your hard drives, but it also comes with features that you don’t see on other enclosures on the market today.

MB973SP-B Features Overview

• Individual power button for each drive: Features of the Icy Dock MB973SP-B include being able to turn off the power to each hard drive independently from each other. This will allow to save power when that particular hard drive is not in use. Besides saving power it will also increase the life of the hard drive since it will not be spinning up.
• Tray-Less design for easy hard drive access: The enclosure also has front access to hot swap your hard drives. The enclosure has a tray-less design for plug & play and hot swap use. No more fumbling around with removing the side of your case when you need to swap out hard drives.
• 80mm cooling fan with smart cooling technology: Heat can be a major contributor to the reduced life of new hard drive, especially for RAID setups since the drives run at the same time. With the Icy Dock MB973SP-B cooling is improved due to its dedicated hard drive fan. The Icy Dock MB973SP-B has a 80mm fan keeping your hard drives cool for longevity and performance. The enclosure also has a fan controller with smart-cooling technology to make sure the fan is supplying enough air to the drives. The controller senses the drives temperature and speeds up or down the fan as needed. The enclosure has both 2 PIN and 3 PIN fan connector which compatible with most of the high performance fan on the market.
• Front side USB and eSATA ports: Another feature of the Icy Dock MB973SP-B is the two easy access front panel interface connectors. The first is a standard USB port perfect for a thumb drives or any USB device instead of going around the back of the case. Second is an eSATA connector for portable 2.5" drive with eSATA interface like the Icy Dock MB668US-1SB. So you can connect it directly to the front eSATA port and connect the USB to the USB port for the power.

The Icy Dock MB973SP-B follows many design themes of some of the popular gaming cases out today. The enclosure has a Black aluminum faceplate that fits most of the popular gaming cases. Aluminum body constriction protects the drives and provides better heat dispersion for hard drives. The enclosure allows for SATA 6 Gb/sec for high speed SSD drives so you don’t have to worry about losing any speed with your new lightning fast SSD.

With the possibility of having three hard drives mounted in you case, you can utilize all three hard drives to improve your gaming experience.

Other options:

• Use 3 drives for RAID 5, connect drives to motherboard or RAID controller card.
• Use 2 of the drives for RAID 1 connected to motherboard for protection. Use 1 high performance HDD or SSD for OS & Applications, and have the OS & Applications backup on the RAID 1 drives.
• Use a duplicator program or clone software to make a quick and easy copy of your main hard drive. The Icy Dock MB973SP-B will allow you swap drives in and out to make as many copies as you would like.
• Use one drive for your OS, one for games and applications and the last for storing larger media files.
• Use 2 high performance hard drives in RAID 0 for OS znd applications and use the 3rd drive for making a backup of the risky RAID 0 drives.