Tagan Icy Box hard drive enclosure review

Physical and electrical design

The Icy Box is roughly the size of a CD-ROM drive, and can easily fit into a 5.25" drive bay. The outer shell is translucent gray plastic, and has four screw holes on each side to anchor the device in a drive bay. The Icy Box's design is such that it does not need to be used internally; it can very easily function as an external removable and hot-swappable hard drive kit. Should you opt to use it externally, you will need to find a way to get your SATA cables through the computer chassis to connect to the Icy Box. Some motherboards have rear panel SATA connectors built into the I/O backplane, or available through peripheral slot faceplates -- such boards would be an ideal match for the Icy Box.

At the back of the Icy Box are the standard SATA power and data connectors, vents for the 30mm cooling fan, and a proprietary 2-pin power connector for the same.

The front of the unit has a barrel-style key lock (two keys are included), and a hinged door for the hard drive. When you open the door, a level pops the hard drive out of the SATA connectors so that you can pull it out. Inserting a drive is just as easy -- put one in and shut the door, and your system should recognize it.

Icy Box: not really icy, but a good removable HD solution

Putting it to the test

Depending on how cluttered the inside of your computer chassis is, installing the Icy Box internally can be difficult. It's easier to connect the cables to the Icy Box first, then feed them back through the inside of the case and plug them into the motherboard. Once installed, the Icy Box isn't something you have to worry about -- connecting hard drives to it is as seamless as connecting internal hard drives. You do not need special drivers, and Icy Box works with every desktop and server operating system that supports your SATA controller.

In testing this device, I discovered that Windows XP and Vista do not deal with hot-swappability very well. Windows XP would not recognize a newly inserted hard drive unless I restarted the computer. Windows Vista would recognize a newly inserted drive the first time, but if I removed it and tried again, it would not be recognized until I restarted the system. Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD had no trouble with multiple insertions and removals during the same session, though the process went much more quickly (and safely) if I unmounted the drive before I removed it.

Though the 30mm fan is tiny and seemingly insignificant, when I removed hard drives after extended use, they were noticeably cooler than if I'd had them installed internally in the sleds and drive cages of my test computers.

Conclusions

The Tagan Icy Box doesn't really live up to its name -- it's not a hard drive cooling solution, though it does reduce hard drive temperature somewhat. Really this is a removable hard drive kit that can be used internally or externally, as your needs dictate. For someone like me who frequently experiments with different operating systems on different hard drives, the Icy Box is a great little device. It could also see production use in servers or workstations as a backup solution, or for permanently storing large amounts of data on several removable drives. I'm not sure that the price is where it needs to be -- it might be a little expensive for what it does, considering a USB hard drive kit (including the drive) is about twice the price. If you already have the drives ready to go, though, this is an excellent, decently-designed removable hard drive bay.