I use a docking enclosure on my tower computer to simplify running several operating systems and also to prepare hard drives for customers.
I have tried many enclosures over the years, but this review is for two enclosures I have tried from Icy Dock. Both enclosures support SATA hard drives and solid state drives (SSD).
The Icy Dock dual removable drive enclosure allows mounting one or two 2.5 inch drives which can be SSD or hard disks. The drives can be ejected and replaced, but only SATA drives are supported and the computer must be powered down before ejecting the disk or data loss can occur.
To install the dock in the computer, a 3 1/2 or a 5 1/4 inch external bay is required on the computer. One SATA power connector and two SATA data connections are required, too. If a 5 1/4 inch bay is used, an adapter is used to fit the icyDock. I added the Lenovo optical drive bezel for a better appearance. The photo above shows the icyDock installed using the 5 1/4 inch adapter.
Once mounted, the computer can boot from the SATA drive. I connected the upper drive to SATA 3 and the lower drive to SATA 4. I adjusted BIOS to try to boot from SATA 3 first. As it happens, Air Boot is installed on the upper drive so that the computer will start with a boot manager.
With the dock full of drives, I have the following drives in my system. Each one takes one SATA connection.
I installed a new dock in a Lenovo tower computer. This one has three bays; two 2 1/2 inch and one 3 1/2 inch. I added the Lenovo optical drive bezel for a better appearance.
flexiDOCK MB095SP-BThe flexiDOCK MB095SP-B from Icy dock features 2 x 2.5" & 1 x 3.5" bays to hold SATA SSD or hard drives. Swapping drives must be done with the power off. The Removable Docking Enclosure fits in a standard 5.25 inch Bay as used for DVD drives.
To remove a hard drive from the enclosure, simply grab it and pull it out. With the 3 1/2 inch drive, some force is needed to remove it, and there is room on each side of the drive to insert your fingers and get a good grip on the drive.
To install the dock in the computer, a 5 1/4 inch external bay is required on the computer. One SATA power connector and three SATA data connections are required, too. I added the Lenovo optical drive bezel for a better appearance. The photo above shows the icyDock installed using the 5 1/4 inch adapter.
I removed the existing SATA drive, intending to mount it in the enclosure. I used the power and data cables from the hard drive for the enclosure, and I added two more SATA data cables so all three bays have their own data cable.
I'm using the same drives as above, but now none of them need to be permanently mounted.