Home > Consumer Reviews > ICY DOCK MB559US-1S External 3.5" eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure

I was very surprised at how cool my drive stays. It never gets warmer than what a normal person's skin feels to the touch while resting. My biggest concern was heat dissipation since I would be keeping this unit on 24/7.

What makes it even better is the free extra tray that I received via the rebate!

For the price it is a very good value. Easily one of the best looking and best made (materials are top notch) enclosures I've ever seen. Most enclosures are cheap looking and have poor tactile feel, but not this unit.

I purchased this item to use with a Mac Pro after adding the Newer eSATA extender cable which gave me two SATA ports out the back. As a result I have my fastest backup capacity ever...faster than FireWire 800. The ICY DOCK was simple to install, just 6 screws on the tray and slip tie drive in place. A restart is required for the eSATA connector to mount the drive and it operates exactly as an internal drive. On the Mac if you wanted to turn the drive off without shutting down the computer I just use the Disk Utility.app to unmount the drive and turn it off. The USB is hot swappable plug and play. There were no problems or issues encountered in using this drive enclosure. A handy strategy would be to purchase extra drive trays (sleds) and be able to mount different drives. I'd say this is a very good product, cleverly designed and reasonably priced.

I bought this to put my 500gb sata2 seagate 7200rpm hard drive and it rocks. Assembly was a nobrainer without even needing the instructions! Testing the heat i left it on for like 2 days straight and all and the enclosure was barely warm. This is a passive enclosure, no fans and the white light is neat. You can buy replacement cartridges as the enclosure is hotswappable via usb, esata or firewire.

5 stars for build and looks. 5 stars for performance on a non-Mac system.

Unfortunately this enclosure is most definitely not compatible with OS X versions higher than 10.5. From what I've been able to determine during the course of my research is that Mac OS X versions higher than 10.5 will not 'allow' the use of a dual eSATA/USB enclosure for reasons unknown to me. Attaching the enclosure to my MacBook Pro produced an immediate kernel panic, whether via eSATA or USB. Apparently 10.5 has the same issue but is 'more forgiving' and will usually not kernel panic with the use of a dual eSATA/USB enclosure but I can't confirm this from personal experience.

I tried pretty much every recommendation that I found in regards to removing and installing the Silicon Image drivers. I did all of the usual checks to make sure the problem wasn't caused by something else; hard disk check, tried another enclosure, tried another computer. The hard disk worked fine in this enclosure and in another eSATA/USB enclosure on a non-OS X system (Windows XP with MacDrive).

I have been unable to find a suitable solution anywhere online. There are discussions about this problem on the Apple web site dating way back to 2007 but so far no solution.

I've owned this Icy Dock MB559US-1S External 3.5" eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure for over two years now. It's an excellent add-on for backing up a computer system as the eSATA connection lets you back up at full speed instead of being limited by the USB conenction speed. Also, being fanless, it's fairly quite (you can still hear the drive, but at least there's no fan adding to it). Surprisingly, the drives run fairly cool in it. The unit is sturdy, well-made, and nice-looking. Because of the tiny screws used to attach the drive to the drive tray, I'd definitely recommend buying the Extra Hard Drive Tray. I rate this an Excellent 5 stars out of 5.

BTW: if you're interested in an enclosure that doesn't need drive trays and you can situate it close to your computer, take a look at the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station.