ICY DOCK is a leading manufacturer of removable hard drive enclosures. Since our company has always been about the customers, we wanted to create an informal avenue for us to communicate with you! Hopefully, these blogs will provide you with insights and opinions about ICY DOCK products.
Get a bargain on your Seagate or WD 4TB hard drive, and extend the life of your hard drive with the ICY DOCK active cooling enclosure
The ever expanding storage capacity has made it that much more convenient for anyone who needs to store more data into a single hard drive. This is important because 1080p HD videos are more standard now, and need drive capacities to match the size for DVR system, NAS storage, Surveillance system, Media player or Multimedia storage. Since the 4TB capacity hard drives have been announced and released, users can purchase them in two varieties: an internal bare hard drive or external hard drive.
4TB Hard Drive Price Comparison Chart
4TB Internal Bare Hard Drive
4TB External Hard Drive
Western Digital Black WD4001FAEX
4TB HDD
$329.99
Western Digital My Book Essential
4TB HDD
$199.99
Hitachi H3IK40003272SW 4TB HDD
$319.99
Seagate Backup Plus
4TB External HDD
$189.99
To compare the price of the internal bare hard drive and external hard drive, we find that the price of a bare hard drive is at least 40% higher than an external hard drive! For media storage usage, it’s a no brainer to purchase an external hard drive with it being significantly cheaper than the former option with the prices starting from $320 USD for a 4TB internal hard drive. That’s been said, you save $130 from buying a 4TB external hard drive and that leaves plenty of room for purchase an active cooling external enclosure that keeps your drive cool all time, in order to extend the hard drive life and protect your priceless date.
Does heat kill drives? Yes it does.
As the capacity increases, the heat also tends to be follow suit due to the way multiple platters are used in a single hard drive. As you already may know, heat is one of the most important factors of how a hard drive’s longevity is affected. According to National Instruments – “The condition that has the biggest impact on the life of a hard drive is temperature. Heat decreases the life of the hard drive head. A 5 °C increase in temperature could reduce the life of a hard drive by up to two years.” If there isn’t a good source of cooling in the drive environment, you put your data at risk every time the drive is used. Keep in mind, the 2 year warranties provided with a purchase of an external hard drive doesn’t cover any of the data that can be at risk and is much more important to your business or work. With the warranty covered, whenever the drive fails you get a replacement hard drive from hard drive manufacturer, but you also spend huge money on data recovery service, which could be 5 times more than the hard drive price you paid for. So what you really need to consider is, although removing the drive from the external hard drive voids the warranty, having the drive in cool environment actually extends your drive life, and prevents hard drive failure from heat buildup. It is a worth investment to get an active cooling enclosure and save more in the long-term.
Temperature Comparison Chart – ICY DOCK Blizzard vs. Seagate FreeAgent vs StarTech InfoSafe
Results: The Blizzard runs 9.5°C cooler than Seagate FreeAgent, 17°C cooler than InfoSafe Fan-less enclosure when drive is idle, 14°C cooler than Seagate FreeAgent, 16°C cooler than InfoSafe enclosure when drive is running
Remove hard drive from Seagate Backup Plus 4TB External Hard Drive
One of the most effective solutions to accomplish that is to use an active cooling solution. So, the question becomes how do I take an external drive and add active cooling? By removing the external hard drive that you’ve purchased and installing the drive into the Icy Dock Blizzard series, you can have a 4TB high capacity hard drive with cooling to help prevent the drive fail from overheating.
Perhaps you may be also thinking about the external hard drive that is already past its warranty period and would like to use that instead. This will absolutely work as well by removing the hard drive from external hard drive and then installing drive into the Icy Dock Blizzard. Thanks to Blizzard’s tray-less design, installing drive with Blizzard is simple; just remove the 80mm fan module, slide the drive into the enclosure and play. The tray-less design also benefits whoever has drive collections and wanted to quickly swap and access the drive within device. Use Blizzard as HDD dock whenever you need to access your SATA HDD, or use Blizzard as ultimate cooler for your primary storage drive. Moreover, it allows you to upgrade the drive without changing the enclosure and helps you save the bucks in long-run.
The below video shows how to remove HDD from Seagate backup plus external HDD, search on YouTube if you have a different brand external HDD:
How does the Blizzard’s design compare with other external enclosures or drives?
The Blizzard’s cooling philosophy is in the uniquely designed, actively cooled single 80mm fan. The front cooling fan placement cools all sides of the hard drive consistently. Also, a built-in fan controller allows one to have the cooling fan at low, high, or auto as needed. The MB080 will be able to cool all sides of the hard drive and create only one direction of airflow from the front to the back, where the air then exits. This extends the life of the cooling fan as it only intakes cool cold air and increases the overall cooling efficiency of the hard drive, in comparison to other enclosure cooling designs.
The Blizzard has a single LED brightness dial to effortlessly adjust the ambient LED brightness to your preferred liking. To increase the level of functionality, the Blizzard’s LED color will turn from blue to red when the hard drive temperature is over 50°C. Also, the built in fan controller allows you to select low, high, and auto to properly cool the hard drive to help if such a case appears. The auto mode properly adjusts accordingly to your hard drive’s requirements by increasing or decreasing the fan speed as needed.
Whether you purchase an external 4TB hard drive or reuse an older external hard drive, it is important to keep your data safe as losing it could be critical to your project or work. By adding an active cooling solution with the Blizzard series, we showed that you not only save money on the investment long term, but you also gain a device that can help to extend the life of your drive and adds additional utility for any other hard drives that you may use.
The Icy Dock Blizzard Series
Blizzard MB080U3S-1SB SuperSpeed USB 3.0 & eSATA External HDD Enclosure
Drive Fit:
1 x 3.5" SATA I / II / III hard drive
Key Features:
Unique and elegant design with the most effective cooling possible, supported by 80mm cooling fan.
Unique tool-less drive installation.
Direct airflow design to completely cool all sides of the hard drive.
Support SATA 6Gbps 4TB hard drive.
Available interfaces of USB 3.0 & eSATA.
Overheat LED indicator, the ambient LED changes from blue to red
when drive temperature over 50 degree.
3 speed adjustable cooling fan.
3 year warranty.
Applications:
Improve hard drive longevity by reducing heat buildup via dedicated cooling system. Capable as a quick access docking device, great for users with multiple hard drives.
Unique and elegant design with the most effective cooling possible, supported by 80mm cooling fan.
Unique tool-less drive installation.
Direct airflow design to completely cool all sides of the hard drive.
Support SATA 6Gbps 4TB hard drive.
Oxford Chipset for best compatibility with Mac Systems.
Available interfaces of FireWire 800, eSATA & USB 2.0.
Overheat LED indicator, the ambient LED changes from blue to red when drive temperature over 50 degrees.
3 speed adjustable cooling fan.
3 year warranty.
Applications:
Improve hard drive longevity by reducing heat buildup via dedicated cooling system. Capable as a quick access docking device, great for users with multiple hard drives.
The Icy Dock MB996SP-6SB 6 in 1 "ToughArmor" backplane cage offers solid aluminum construction that not only protects the hard drives but provides passive cooling. The MB996SP-6SB fits six 2.5” SSDs or hard drives into the space of a 5.25” bay in the hot swap capable drive bays. Active cooling is provided by a 40mm fan mounted to the back, and the fan speed can be set to off, high, or low speed..........read the full review
There are several manufacturers of such devices but we have one of the better ones on tap for you today. Icy Dock has been doing this for over fifteen years and has become a leader at it. FatCage MB153SP-B is one of several models coming from Icy Dock; the series would include the DataCage Basic and the FlexCage. Each having their own unique features, so we will try and get them into the lab so we can give you more insight on them.........................read the full review
