Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B: 8 SSDs in the space of a 5.25-inch bay

Last updated Nov 21, 2018 839

Interesting solution proposed by Icy Dock, designed to fit into a slot 5.25 a quantity of up to 8 SSD or hard drive 2.5-inch. The Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B intended use is mainly enterprise, but it is of course open the possibility to exploit them even for home use for its super PC.

There are accessories designed to meet requirements very common, others out of necessity outside of their normal, but that can be a very popular choice because of their peculiarity. It falls within the particular Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B. A special cabinet can hold up to eight 2.5-inch drives and 7mm thickness going to occupy the space required by a single 5.25-inch bay. That of common readers / DVD burners dekstop, so to speak.

The construction is very durable, thanks to a chassis entirely metal thought to resist considerable external stresses; no wonder then that the company indicates this product as suitable for medical equipment, systems for military, industrial and so on, apart from the most common home PCs and servers.

The eight drawers hot swap 2.5-inch, called EZ Slide Nano, are cooled by the adoption of two 40mm fans positioned at the rear (see gallery). The potential of this unit are manifold: consider, for example, the ability to integrate disk into two separate chains RAID 5 or RAID 10, or 4 disks in RAID 0 and RAID 1 in the other four, and so on. Obviously within this accessory, you can be used both SSD and traditional hard disk drives, with great potential in terms of performance and/or capacity according to requirements, all in very little space.

There are LEDs which monitor the operations of each unit individually installed; while the drawers EZ Slide Nano are fixed to the chassis with a special attack that avoids the leakage of the discs even in cases of shock or other unexpected factors. The Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B supports power cables to 7 pin SATA but also the 15-pin, and comes with 32 small screws fixing HDD / SSD (4 for each of the 8 tray), user manual, 10 screws to fix the houses and drive plug ID, in practice of the plastic inserts with numbering from 1 to 8 to be inserted in each of the drawers to distinguish them.

Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B – Description

Active Power Technology (APT) – individual led & cooling fan only powers up if there is a drive installed in the bay.
Fits 8 x 7mm 2.5″ SATA hard drives or SSD’s in a single 5.25″ bay for high performance RAID applications, requires only 2 x 15pin power connectors to power all 8 bays.
Dual 40mm fans keep your drives from overheating.
Anti-Vibration Technology (AVT) – creates a safe environment for hard drives or SSDs.
Supports SATA 6 Gbps and hot swap.

The official price is around 200 US dollars, although at first glance it seems you can find online Icy Dock ToughArmor MB998SP-B at significantly lower prices.