Icy Dock FlexiDOCK Drive Enclosure

I am also impressed about the support from ICY Dock, they answer me questions about the cables and adapters. Used an "Cablecc NGFF M-Key NVME to U.2 U2 Kit SFF-8639 to SFF-8654 Slimline SAS PCIe SSD Adapter for Mainboard" and "DiLiVing SlimSAS 4i (SFF-8654 38pin) to SlimSAS 4i (SFF-8654 38pin) Straight Cable 1M " currently still available at Amazon the day I wrote the review. You also have to power the drive with a Sata power from the PSU.

returned the first one as it didn't work.. replacement doesn't either. I connect the drives directly and they work fine. We buy many SATA bays from IcyDock never had a problem, but this just does not work. I'm going to try the MB601M2K-1B as that one seems to use a regular cable (not mini-SAS) ... they can't mess that up surely ! After a web search I saw some other poor guy got 3 bad units in a single order. My conclusion is a whole batch of these bays are defective.

i'm using 3.84TB sandisk skyhawk drives in these, and they are working fine now that i replaced the fans. the stock fans suck a s s. barely move air. with the stock fans in place the drives hit 75*C and throttle down like crazy during heavy writes. fortunately i had some sunon maglev fans and appropriate screws to hold them that i was able to throw on this thing. the case is now much quieter and temps don't pass 55*C, which for these drives is normal. at this price they should have better fans, or charge a few more dollars for better fans. really nice fans cost only like $2 in bulk, as opposed to these 50 cent fans. having said that, i'm still giving 5 starts since there is nothing else out there. no one else makes anything like this for us DIY people who don't want to overpay for junk dell and lenovo servers. this is a low volume item for a very niche market, we take what we can get.

Since the MB601VK is part of Icy Dock's 'ToughArmor' series for which Icy Dock makes many bold claims on its website I assumed this suggests I will get better quality and reliability than with other docks, so I paid a not exactly small sum of £89.50 for an MB601VK. However, as it turned out the overall quality impression isn't exactly great. Yes, it's metal, but the workmanship is quite rough. The sled is made from sheet metal and has some pretty rough edges to it which is something I would not expect for that price. What's worse, though, is that the rear SFF8639 connector is of such poor quality that standard U.2 NVME cables (which sit snug on any other SFF8639 connector!) on the MB601VK sit so lose that the cable easily detaches by itself (I tried three different cables, all brand name). There is also no mechanical support for that connector. I guess this is why I had intermittent connections. In the end I decided to return the Icy Dock MB601VK and instead bought a Syba SY-MRA25059 U.2 dock instead, which did cost only £29.32 so less than half of the Icy Dock MB601VK. And guess what, the quality is way better, and the SFF8639 connector is properly supported!

Great way to add 4 NVMe drives to a 5 1/4 bay. I will but more when the price comes down