Question 1

If I have all bays loaded with drives, can I turn on each drive individually or does the power switch control all bays that result in all of them powering up at the same time.?

Accepted Answer

All bays are powered. If you do not use this for RAID, you can choose which drives you access. Inactive drives will spin down.  I use it for JOBD via the eSATA port.

Overall, I'm happy with it. The only thing I will caution you on (Without knowing your potential usage intention.) is if you want to use a RAID card with eSATA, spend the extra money and get a higher end card. I tried to get away with a marvell based card and wasn't able to use it, unfortunately.

Question 2

What are the recommended drives for this?  I want 6TB drives. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba?   Which variety of these.

Thanks in advance.

Accepted Answer

It works with all drives... Brand name of drive doesn't matter. That being said, SATA 6TB limit.

For long term use as a file server, you should be looking at NAS drives i.e. WD RED drives. I use mine with the eSATA cable in conjunction with my NAS to "archive" my movie/TV Show collection. Still can get to them easy enough, but less used files are not taking up space on my NAS.

Question 3

I will be getting the ASUS SABERTOOTH Z97 MARK1 LGA 1150 Intel Z97 motherboard.  Have read that onboard port multiplies don't work with externals that need them for sata.  Is that also the case with the Mark1?  If so, what port multiplier card will actually work with this Icy?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the card shows all 4 drives.  The dock only uses one cable so technically you only one esata port from the card. The card can be configured for external or internal Sata so it has 4 ports. It comes ready for 2 external ports enabled.  You can only enable 2 sata ports at a time with this card according the instructions. It has jumpers. The only thing that was unclear to me, is if you can jumper it for one external and one internal. This could be useful if you want to upgrade a motherboard that does not support Sata 3. I'm running windows 7 FYI. No problems at all, no drop outs, It's rock solid. Your board may very well show all 4, If it supports port multiplier, then it should work. "Should" being the operative word here.  If it does not, this card should work fine. It does for me.  I have the same dock.

Question 4

How sturdy is the latch? I own a case from another brand and it has plastic in the latching mechanism. I have twice broken tiny plastic ears off of the plastic latch so far.

Accepted Answer

Hi,

None of the latches worked on the first enclosure i received . I couldn't open any of them even using a small tool to apply pressure.

That said, IcyDock was just terrific in helping resolve the issue by taking back the bay i purchased from Newegg so they could see what the problem had been and cross shipped me a new bay.

This one works just fine and seems quite sturdy, though i have only used it for 2 days.

Question 5

are there any hard drive size limitations?

Accepted Answer

Can't answer for sure about size limitations, but I would think the limitation would be in the MB bios, controller or operating system and not the Dock but I could be wrong.

Question 6

Does this device support JBOD?

Accepted Answer

I'm pretty sure I had the option of spanning with windows 7 when I set it up, although I didn't do that.  It does  not do J bod on it's own., that I do know.

Questions & Answers