Raidsonic ICY BOX IB-3620U3 Drive Enclosure External - Black - 2 x HDD Supported - Serial ATA/600 Controller

Delivered to my local post office inside 24 hours and I never use Prime! It's working fine on USB3 backing up thousands of photo files as I type this. See the photo and note that the power unit has a continental plug! I think that's disgusting for Amazon. Luckily I had a conversion plug and this has done the job but as I think Amazon may be breaking the law and a lot of the cheap adaptors for electric razors etc are too wobbly to use on this kind of kit. Now a warning that could cost you money or dissappointment. If you are thinking of installing a couple of discs from an old PC they may not have the pluggery fitted on current machines. Current HDDs have just two sockets about 27mm and 12mm long. Older bigger units may as well go into the crusher!I hadn't considered this but luckily I also bought two new drives. However I hadn't given any thought to the need to pre-format new discs and this can be a messy time-consuming niggle as they must be pre-formatted BEFORE fitting. This is possible with most current desktops as there is usually a spare pair of connectors in the wiring harness you will find when you take off the side panel. (Be sure to shut down and switch off before going into the PC and only attempt this if you are sufficiently competent). My Windows 10 didn't recognize a new disc and automatically offer to format it and I had to find the way myself via Control Panel > Storage Spaces where you should recognize your disc in Storage pool and select 'no residency'. It should take only a couple of seconds to format a new disk. If you can follow all that and can get a unit with the right power unit it is probably a good deal.

Nice little box and fits in well with my media centre but does tend to cause boot up issues if left in standby mode. Got two new 2tb hard drives and any new drive requires partitioning and formatting before your system will recognise the Icy Box, of course Windows makes the process overly complex and hard to find stock software but a little Googling will show you how. Once all setup I backed up over 100 films using free software called "Bart" and it did a great job in around 30 mins, box connected to USB 3. My only gripe is the boot up issue, just booted up with the box in standby and the PC froze with no desktop icons, forced closed PC and turned Icy Box off and PC then booted normally. This is following a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional 64bit, it may be my fault but no idea why, it's like the PC is trying to read and locks onto one of the drives. No big issue for me as only using this to back up video, ebooks, photo, music etc so will only turn on when need to do this. The good point about Bart is that you can setup custom backups with dedicated colour and it does not duplicate only saving newly added. The build is OK, nothing mind blowing, but does have protective film covering shiny bits that's a bu**er to remove.tj

Love this item.I decided to buy an enclosure to hold two 3.5 HDDs for my Home Theatre PC. Did my research and settled on the IcyBox. Have to say - I'm glad I did.What a quality bit of kit this is - looks lovely next to my Home Theatre PC and looks very sleek. I've had compliments off other tech-savvy friends who think it cost twice the amount it did.My PC runs Windows 7, and it had no issue finding the enclosure - there's no drivers to install or anything like that, it's just like plugging in a USB stick. I've got 2 x 2TB drives in it - WD and HGST - and they both achieve very good write speeds over USB 2.0. I've tried it on USB 3.0 as well and, as you'd expect, the speeds are blisteringly fast.The fan isn't as noisy as some would have you believe - probably as noisy as a laptop, if that. You can also turn the fan lower if it bothers you. I personally have it on the middle setting and it's barely audible.It's solidly built and it's very easy to take drives in and out, although you'd want to buy more handles for it to be truly hot-swappable.My only gripe is the USB cable supplied is a little shorter than I'd like, but this can be easily rectified by buying a longer one.

I used this with my iMac for just over a year without any major problems. As some have noted, the fan is quite noisy, but not too bad. However, when I switched over to a new Mac with USB 3, I found that it wouldn't recognise the device and mount the volumes, whereas it was still working fine if I used a USB 2 cable. After a few back and forth emails with RaidSonic support, the end conclusion was that the USB3 controller was faulty on the unit. As the device was just out of warranty, there was no offer to repair or replace, or even apologise, and the support representative's unhelpful view was that it's not an expensive device it would be cheaper to replace. Maybe so, but it's disappointing that this device isn't built to last longer than a year. I won't be considering this brand again.

There are a couple of positives to this. First of all, and though not mentioned in the documentation, this enclosure DOES work with linux (I am on Mint 17, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), and it WILL respond to some smart monitoring tools enquiries. It's acceptably quick, too, for someone used to SATA 150 speeds.Thankfully, I don't need the HDDs I bought it to contain all the time because this unit has a noisy, Noisy, NOISY fan. I bought a 3 metre USB extension cable, to see whether I could ignore the noise at a distance of 2 to 2.5m - the distance for the ISO Standard on measuring acoustics is 0.6m (that's two feet in old money), It is still quite noticeable. In fact, I can hear it from a few feet outside my study.Last nail in the coffin - a question about support left on RAIDSONIC's website went unanswered.I plan to replace it with a proper SAN as soon as I afford it.