Icy Dock MB080U3S-1SB Blizzard 3.5″ SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure Review

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Benching our Seagate Barracuda drive on its own gives us a baseline performance that we will use to compare linear (sequential) read speeds.

Firstly we hooked up the enclosure via the eSATA interface, and we found that whilst the speeds achieved were consistent, the performance that we found in respect to a pure SATA connection was worse that what we would have expected with speeds below the 170MB/s mark.

After seeing the eSATA results, our immediate worry that this would be the same with the USB interface and a slow set of speeds, however this time we found the speeds to reflect more like we found under SATA conditions with linear read speeds just below the 200MB/s mark.