Introduction
A quick review for you today, to break up the monotony of graphics, CPU and motherboard articles that seem to be all we focus on sometimes.The external hard disk enclosure market is on the up. The cost of buying a cheap, large hard drive, just as a means to a portable data store, allowing you to do it yourself rather than buy a pre-built solution from one of the usual vendors, means that demand for high quality external hard disk enclosures has risen.
That increase in demand means that prices are more than reasonable now, for disk enclosures that attach to a variety of different peripheral interconnects on your PC, be that USB2.0, FireWire or even Serial ATA.
So you can get yourself a cheap disk, a cheap but decent enclosure and have yourself some portable data storage with which to take to LAN parties, to and from work, bundled along with your laptop or whatever scenario fits.
The enclosures, as befits anything PC related these days, are often quite good looking, adding to their appeal.
One such vendor of good looking external disk enclosures is RaidSonic Technology GmbH. They've got something for everyone, from your basic single-disk USB2.0 enclosure with no fancy extras, right up to multi-disk external RAID enclosures and NAS boxes.
Their Icy Box range is what's targetted at the basic end-user space. The Icy Box enclosures are for one disk that hooks up to USB2.0, FireWire or SATA, and it's the IB-350U-BL that I grabbed for my personal use, but that turned out to be worth a short review.
IB donates Icy Box, 350U is the enclosure type which you'll see shortly, with BL denoting blue lighting, an essential for the computer fashionista. You get 350U Icy Box models with no lighting and different detailing, so there's a few models to choose from, their connection method to your PC defining them even further.
Onwards to the unit itself.
