The day of the floppy has well and truly passed, with 8x DVD writers available for under £50 and super fast USB2.0 pen drives offering hundreds of times the capacity for a relatively inexpensive price. Nothing, however, comes close to the speed and sheer capacity of the hard disk drive, where once again prices have become almost ludicrously cheap. The only trouble with hard drives is that they are inconvenient to transport data on, since you have to unscrew them from the chassis, change jumper settings, screw them into the other PC and so on; or at least that is the case unless you have an external disk.
External hard drives, however, are a little overpriced and generally not upgradeable when faster, larger units are available. Icy Box now produces an aluminium enclosure barely larger than the 3.5” drive it holds with high speed connectivity options. It promises easy change of hard drive, exceptional design and ultra fast transfer rates. The one we have today is the IB-350U-BL, which offers IDE compatibility and a USB 2.0 hot swap connection. The IB350UE-BL is also available which has both USB 2.0 and Firewire, as well as the IB350US-BL which offers SATA drive compatibility.
USB2.0 offers transfer rates of up to 480mb/s, which equates to a peak of 60MB/s. Most fast hard drives only approach those speeds under peak burst conditions, so the interface should not impair the drives speed. I use Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drives in all of our mission critical machines as they remain the only major brand so far from which I have not had a failed drive. Fortunately, I have two identical 8MB cache 120GB drives which makes for ideal comparison between the Icy Box and a regular IDE connection.
