TKSeminars

I’ve been searching far and wide for a “smart” way to store and easily access archived data. In the past few years most of my data has been stored on 3.5″ internal hard drives and I’ve been using an enclosure made by Vantec called the EZ-Swap. Great product on serveral accounts - the most interesting being (1) locking on/off mechanism, (2) fan, temperature and disk hours usage information, and (3) lower cost. The downfall of the Vantec enclosure for me : (1) doesn’t fit in any standard external 5.25″ enclosure - the back is too big! Until recently this wasn’t a problem since the enclosure was mounted internally on my PC or a large chassis with room enough for the back.

Alas, I’ve *finally* found THE solution for this problem - the IcyDock External Rack. Interestingly enough, the IcyDock uses the SAME tray enclosure as the Vantec or visa versa ( I can’t tell who makes the original product, or if even a third vendor supplies these to IcyDock and Vantec ). The nice thing about this fact is that all of my IDE-based Vantec drives will fit into the IcyDock enclosure without me having to buy a new tray. The cooler thing is now I have the freedom to move to SATA drives, which are faster, more reliable and cheaper than their aging IDE/ATA brethren!

Way to go IcyDock! Thanks for building a smart enclosure for my archives - and my existing Vantec tray enclosures to boot!

Check out the IcyDock review that tipped me off here :

IcyDock MB452 eSATA/USB2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure Review - PCSTATS.com