Icy Box USB 2.0 External Drive

If the drive is formatted in NTFS it will only be readable on the Mac.

:|

Good article.. one of the sorts of things I've had on my to buy list for years now.. :)

Nothing is simple in Linux

heh.. ain't that the truth.

Might I ask why you had this review on the site at the top of the page all day, yet waited until NOW to post the site link? :|

Either way, this is definitely an item I am going to look into. ;)

Dear Fly, that is not KDE it is Gnome...

So its basically the "metal gear box" i have here but with blue lights? The only problem with them is the heat generated and isolating the vibration is a bit hard.

I use one between lappy and main pc (mostly lappy for extra space) and it works really well on usb2, dont even consider using it on usb1 cause its sooooooo damn slooooooow.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
So its basically the "metal gear box" i have here but with blue lights? The only problem with them is the heat generated and isolating the vibration is a bit hard.

I use one between lappy and main pc (mostly lappy for extra space) and it works really well on usb2, dont even consider using it on usb1 cause its sooooooo damn slooooooow.

Yep, this is just a modified Speeze 'metal gear box' - I don't like how I can't find anywhere on the main 'icy box' site saying 'this is a modified speeze metal gear box' ....

If anyone in the United States wants to buy one of these enclosures (without the lights though, but with a little modding you could throw some led's in there and make it a lot better) check out this link: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=17-145-743&DEPA=1


Edit: Here's a differently branded one but it has the same lights!
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=17-155-211&DEPA=1

Bah, not used to GUI in linux... amended.

Originally Posted by Boon
:|

Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS partitions, it can only read from them.

I think Boon took it to mean that if you format it in NTFS the only OS you could use it with is the Mac.

Originally Posted by RotoSequence
Might I ask why you had this review on the site at the top of the page all day, yet waited until NOW to post the site link? :|

Didn't want to push mrHaz' article to second place so soon after posting.

these enclosures get around lol.
I have one branded as a "speed metal box" and my dad has a metal gear branded one.
I use it for multi-track audio on my laptop (gotta love those pentium m's) when I'm away from my main rig and on the firewire it will do pretty much as many tracks as my main rig lol.

Originally Posted by Fly
Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS partitions, it can only read from them.

Thanks for clearing that up..:).. All I know about Macs is they look pretty..;)

nice article, jus saw them on kustompcs yesterday and was like 'aye aye'

i currently have a western digital 250gb in clear plastic horizontal case with no cooling, soooo hot, any idea what the icy box is like for temperatures?

I have a few questions:

The article on the last page mentions that that bottleneck is the USB 2.0 connection and yet you also say that an ATA66 connector has a bandwidth of 66Mbps and that USB 2.0 has a bandwidth of 480Mbps... surley that would make ATA the bottleneck..?

I always had the impression that USB 2.0 was much faster than USB 1.1 but still not that fast. I have a USB 2.0 mp3 player (the Nomad Zen) and when I transfer large files from to to my computer it can take a fair while. Also it's impossible to run any programs or media files from the drive without transfering to my local hard drive first. Does this Icy Box allow you to do this? If so what is the performance like? For example if I installed Far Cry on a seperate disk and shoved it into one of these boxes, how long would it take to load a level...?

usb2 = 480 mBITS/s
ata66 = 66 mBYTES/s

usb is 60mB/s
however you'd be hardpushed to find a drive that can do that unless you use a raptor or something

DeX, zen takes ages cos its just a laptop drive, slow++
assuming it just gets picked up as a mass storage device (which the zens dont) you will be able to run programs/media from it
but it wont be as fast as an equivilent drive internally

The major bottleneck in this unit is of course the USB 2.0 connection, with a theoretical maximum throughput of 480Mbps the ATA interface is certainly going to be doing the waiting (ATA66 running at 66MBps).

MB = MegaByte
Mb = Megabit

As for running farcry from an external USB drive, I have no idea. I suspect that unless the whole level is loaded into memory the USB 2.0 Interface will bottleneck. Small programs shouldn't have such problem as their memory footprint is likely to be small, unless of course there is some kind of dependency or absolute address that points to a required file on the mobile HD or a required entry in the windows registry added at install time.