Icy Dock For Mac
Some of you may remember this thread: In it, I described my woes with my relatively new Mac Pro and unusual hanging behaviour that would render my Mac unable to boot even in safe mode. I knew that the problem likely stemmed from the aftermarket 2 SSDs, 1 HD, and 4 RAM sticks (all from OWC except the HD) that I had stuffed in the machine from the day it arrived via FedEx. After about 6 months of incredible frustration, and long periods where my machine just sat unpowered like a ridiculously overpriced brick when I needed to get real work done, extensive diagnostics (many days worth that came up with nothing), about 5 OS re-installs from scratch, and finally resorting to randomly pulling out components and just seeing if the problem was replicated with certain parts of the system excluded, I've finally had a few consecutive weeks with zero problems. The culprit: 2 OWC Icy Docks (SSD adapters for a 3.5' drive bay) with faulty, intermittent electrical contacts causing extremely erratic behaviour.
Now that these have been excluded from the system, it's been rock-solid reliable as it should be. I wouldn't normally bring this beef to a place like this (and I know there are many, many happy Icy Dock users out there), but this problem hasn't been very widely described, and it caused me so much grief and took so long to diagnose that I wanted to put it out there for people to at least consider if they have Icy Docks on board and begin to have unexplained flaky behaviour from their MPs. Thanks to all who lent a hand in the work-up of the problem in the previous thread.
That is one strange design. Why would they not make a purely physical adapter which positions the 2.5' drive connecters in the same place as a 3.5' drive? Does the Mac Pro connect drives via a backplane or cables? Anyway, nice that your problem is solved. Edit: (one forgotten word totally changed the meaning of what I said.
Why wouldn't they just make it a physical adapter? The connectors are the same and in the same relative position so it should be possible to adapt a SSD with just a piece of bent metal with screw holes. I'm thinking of - plug in either size drive, to what is effectively a backplane.). The 2 Icy Docks and 2 SSDs are just sitting outside the machine now. One SSD (my boot drive) is in the lower optical bay. No adapter is required.
I've got 2 HDs in the sleds. Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I was burned so badly that I'm pretty gunshy about using any kind of adapter again, though I'm open to suggestions if anybody has them. If you're only running one SSD in your machine, my advice would be to use the optical bay (SSD drive plugs straight in) and forget the adapter, but I obviously have significant bias. And re: OWC not being the manufacturer, thanks for pointing that out. The 2 Icy Docks and 2 SSDs are just sitting outside the machine now. One SSD (my boot drive) is in the lower optical bay.
No adapter is required. I've got 2 HDs in the sleds. Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I was burned so badly that I'm pretty gunshy about using any kind of adapter again, though I'm open to suggestions if anybody has them.
If you're only running one SSD in your machine, my advice would be to use the optical bay (SSD drive plugs straight in) and forget the adapter, but I obviously have significant bias. Not able to see projects/clone files into visual studio for mac download. And re: OWC not being the manufacturer, thanks for pointing that out.
GK I have a second optical drive in my machine. The MaxUpgrades bracket looks like it just plugs the drive straight into the MacPro without the board in the middle. Sucks that it's $25 but I may go that route if the new drive acts dodgy as well. Here's the MaxUpgrades physical adapter. I had a similar problem with the same Icy Dock converter - it bricked two of my OWC SSD drives such that after removing power from them, they 'forgot' everything that was ever written to them.
A restart would not cause the problem (power is not removed from the drive), and they operated fine once the system was booted and the drives were initialized - then a shutdown later and it was like the SSDs were never initialized. It looks like OWC now has their own part which does away with the whole 'converter' approach. I'm thinking I'll replace the 4 Icy Docks I have with these instead. It took me a few hours over the course of about a week to troubleshoot the problem.
I was building out a new Mac Pro and purchased 5 of the 200GB SSD drives. Since I had been rebooting instead of shutting down while I setup the system and software, and since I added certain drives at different times, it was very baffling. When I realized that one of the drives had the problem, I thought it was just a bad drive, and swapped it for spare that I had previously initialized in another bay (w/another icy dock). Upon partitioning that spare drive in the 'faulty' icy dock and powering down, it exhibited the same 'amnesia' problem.
While I don't have any proof that it was the icy dock, I replaced the faulty icy dock with another and since then the drive inside (replaced by OWC) has been operating normally. It might just be a coincidence, but getting TWO bad SSDs (out of 5) and them both 'failing' with the same Icy Dock seemed unlikely.
Before mounting the original 5 drives in the Icy Docks, I updated their firmware successfully to the latest version. I would think that if it were a firmware bug, the problem would be evident on all the drives (they're using the same fw).
It really drove me bonkers for a few days though. I do plan to replace the icy docks with the hardware mounts instead, but spending another $100 for a $2 worth of aluminum is about as fun as spending the first $100 on $1 of plastic. Does anybody want to buy five Icy Docks? $50 for all 5, shipped free to USA!!! Come on, they're barely used!!! I suspect that if you get the SSD seated properly in the IcyDock, and the Icy Dock seated properly in the sled, and then it works properly and you leave things alone, you're probably good. I just can't bring myself to chance it now.
I'll have to see if OWC will take my IcyDocks as returns. You're probably right. But like all of us who have had issues with SSDs in our Mac Pros, the $25 to get the direct connecting sled is well worth the hassle of possible troubles down the line. It was very frustrating and it screwed up my access to my computer when I was overseas. The new bracket will be welcomed either way.
Ugh, this explains a lot of issues over the last year. We've only been sort of beta deploying SSDs, so I never quite tracked down exactly what was causing so many issues. But this certainly sounds like it matches my experience. What an irritation, at least I'm glad to see there are specific hard sled adapters now, back when I got them the Icy Dock seemed like the best solution.
But data reliability issues are just so irritating to track down, and can cause so many problems, definitely worth $25. Going to have to just write off the whole shot though, it's been way too long at this point for returns to be a viable option.
I have a Pro with an SSD and Icy Dock and it's absolutely rock solid. I guess they're not all bad. In modern electronics it's very, very unusual to have a product run that's 'all bad' or even mostly bad. Only surprising and delayed time reveal manufacturing defects (ala Intel's SB issues, which wouldn't necessarily appear even with stress testing in the short term) tend to cause issues like that. And of course by the same token there's no such thing as 100% reliability either, a couple percent defect rate is not unexpected.
Icy Dock For Mac Free
However, having done some more Googling now, Icy Dock appears to have passed the threshold for me at least in a few ways. First, storage is an area where tolerance for issues is going to be much lower for obvious reasons, and second it's not an obvious failure mode, which leads to subtle issues that are just more frustrating to diagnose. If you've already got something and it's working, you're probably fine, if the drive has been stressed and you aren't popping it in/out all the time then I don't see why it would fail in the future.
But given the price in particular I see no reason to get it over a direct physical adapter at this point. Mac Pro's + SSD's always seem like an iffy to me. Tons of people have been using them for a while now, often in very stressful situations.
There's no reason they wouldn't work like anything else SATA, particularly if you're using a direct physical adapter. The only real thing to keep in mind is not Mac Pro based but OS X based, namely OS X isn't much on TRIM yet and can behave poorly when dealing with unexpected latency spikes, so there's a couple more factors to take into account when choosing an optimal SSD brand. Beyond that though, the Mac Pro is a fantastic match, since it has a good number of easily swapped drive bays which make it trivial to have both SSD and HDD storage available internally. I have a Pro with an SSD and Icy Dock and it's absolutely rock solid. I guess they're not all bad. I'm not even sure it's a matter of the IcyDocks being all bad or all good. I think there might be some incompatibility between some SSDs and the IcyDock.
I mean, the Mushkin drive I just put in has been rock solid for the past few days. The Corsair Force that was in there would hang at least once every few hours. Same IcyDock, but perhaps something about Corsair's drives make it not work well with the IcyDock.
At this point, when there are direct connecting options available there's no point in using an IcyDock anyway. Why even take the chance of putting a controller board between your SSD and the MacPro's SATA connector? Mushkin and Corsair use the same Sandforce controller.
So there's got to be something else in there that's causing issues. Well, for those of you who are considering the MaxUpgrades bracket to replace the IcyDock, I just swapped mine out tonight. Took about ten minutes. Here are some pictures so you can see what it's about: It completely replaces the Apple drive sled. It's a nice piece of machined aluminum. Kinda feel stupid playing $25 for it, but it fits perfectly.
This version is for the 2008 Mac Pro but they have a version for the newer machines. They also have a version with a heat sink if you're so inclined although I think those are really for spinners. The drive is held by four screws. Two on the bottom of the drive and two on the side. They're different length screws and the kit includes the small allen keys and screws to put it together.
Fits very snug. I like that it doesn't block more space and airflow than it has to.
I have a Pro with an SSD and Icy Dock and it's absolutely rock solid. I guess they're not all bad. I'm not even sure it's a matter of the IcyDocks being all bad or all good. I think there might be some incompatibility between some SSDs and the IcyDock. I could see them testing the snot out of a few known configurations and having problems crop up with others. I bought mine as a package deal on Macsales with their house branded drive (one that automatically compensates for lack of TRIM support), I wonder if the issues happen more frequently with other drives.
I installed an OCZ Vertex 2 in an Icy Dock in my Mac Pro last Sunday. For several days, everything seemed smooth, and I was interested in this thread but not concerned.
Wednesday night: wouldn't wake from sleep; had to hard restart. Thursday night: first kernel panic in literally years (probably since 10.1 or 10.2). I immediately reverted the boot disk to the standard drive that I had previously used. I'll probably try rigging something with velcro strips so that I can plug the SSD in directly, to test whether the problem is the drive or the Icy Dock.
I got the Icy Dock from Amazon, so I hope a return/refund won't be too difficult. The MaxUpgrades bracket looks nice but kind of overkill in terms of materials and price. The 'wouldn't wake from sleep' problem might not be at all related to the Icy Dock. There are some issues with the Sandforce firmware and the sleep function of Macs. I ran into a similar problem on my Mac Pro with an OWC Mercury SSD, but I've got my drive hooked up directly inside the optical bay so there is no Icy Dock that could cause the problem. If you can update the firmware of your drive, you should try that first.
I'm still waiting on OWC to put together an OS X firmware utility so I can update my drive (I don't have Windows running anywhere around the house). In the meantime, I set my computer to never sleep automatically and that has avoided any repeats of the issue. Manually putting it to sleep has never been a problem. I know, bumping an old thread and all that, but A thought occoured to me, while installing the SSD in the bare Optical Drive space of my 2010 Mac Pro; that being, Apple sell the system with an SSD installed. Or, if you have oodles of cash, 4 of them. Clearly, Apple had some sort of adapter to cram the little 2.5' drives into their full size SATA sleds. So, after a little trip to the Genius Bar, I arrived home with a 922-9629, SSD Sled Carrier.
Total cost was a whopping £8,20 - that's including the 20% sales tax in the UK. Works out to about $14 or so. Hardly break the bank money, here. I spend almost that much at Starbucks on an average day It's a very nice aluminium physical adapter, that slots into the stock Apple Drive Sled, and holds a 2.5' (9.5mm) drive in place. Pictures below.
Click to see larger on Flickr, as always. I bought one of these to go with an OCZ Summit SSD (G2 Samsung) back in 2009 for use in my 2008 MP. Some months later, I started experiencing problems with the disk, getting write transfer rates as low as 300KB/s (sequential). I didn't have a lot of time to troubleshoot, so I just bought another SSD (Intel X25M) and copied my disk over.
I stuck the X25M into the Icy Dock and it has worked OK since. I don't have any proof that the Icy Dock was at fault - it didn't even occur to me at the time to try the Summit without it. I did put the Summit into another computer where it's been working fine.
Icy Dock U6-1S-WBC Enclosure Our last two drive enclosures from Icy Dock have been elegant, beautiful affairs that were as good-looking as they were functional. In contrast, the U6-1S-WBC is strictly business. We find out if its performance is as serious as its looks. General Usage was cooled by an 80mm, rear-mounted, removable fan that proved to be, along with the price, our main complaint about the unit. It was just too noisy. But since the U6 is passively cooled, it had almost no sound signature beyond the hard drive itself.
Being excited to actually use our FW800 port, that was the first interface we tested with our 7200RPM IDE drive. The results were immediately puzzling. We took our usual 6.5GB video file from the Windows desktop and dropped it onto the Icy Dock. And then we waited.
It took 12 minutes and 20 seconds to copy the file over. Understanding that FW800 is unquestionably faster than USB 2.0, we were incredibly curious to see what would happen when we tried this over the latter bus.
We dismounted the drive, powered it down, hooked up the USB cable, powered it up, and waited, and waited, and waited. The drive never mounted on the Windows desktop.
We thought it might be an issue with the Mac, so in the interests of thoroughness, we brought out the laptop we briefly retained for testing purposes. Again, we hooked up the USB cable, powered it up, andآ nothing. We even tried a different USB cable with our in-house Maxtor 7200RPM SATA drive, which of course necessitated the use of the other tray, just to be sure. This unitآ’s USB port was decidedly DOA.
After a call to Icy Dock, we got another, identical unit. Of course, the first thing we did was hook it up via USB to the Dell running XP. Weآ’re happy to report that the drive mounted almost immediately, and we were able to continue with our testing.
It should also be noted that the new unitآ’s tolerances, while still perhaps overly precise, were a bit more forgiving than the initial enclosureآ’s. This time, with the Maxtor 7200RPM SATA drive over USB 2.0, our 6.5GB file still took 4 minutes and 41 seconds. We thought this a little disappointing since our managed the same transfer in only 3 minutes and 18 seconds.
On a whim, we tried it on the Mac as well and had nearly the same results at 4 minutes and 33 seconds. We then dismounted the drive and hooked the unit up via FireWire 800 to the Mac booted to XP. Over that bus to the Maxtor SATA drive, the 6.5GB file took 3 minutes and 5 seconds. The 1394b bus was definitely faster, but we were expecting even more speed from it than we got. Next, we pestered our neighbor to borrow the IDE drive out of his aging Optiplex once more. A six-pack of and a handshake were required, but we again hooked up the Mac running XP to the Icy Dock with his drive.
We were confident enough with the Macآ’s nearly identical performance to the Dell to make it our primary test machine for the rest of the evaluation. The IDE drive was a little bit slower than the SATA Maxtor, turning in a time of 4 minutes and 55 seconds over USB 2.0 and 3 minutes and 50 seconds over IEEE 1394b. Finally, we transferred about 130 2MB JPEG images to the drive and viewed them in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, where we experienced a negligible amount of lag when previewing and loading them. During all of our testing, the unit stayed cool to the touch, with the main differential in heat being on the laterally mounted aluminum heat sinks. They were apparently doing their job. In short, we were surprised by the relative sluggishness of the U6 considering its pedigree and cost. We were also disappointed by its utter lack of styling and panache.
Itآ’s a black slab that closely resembles the monolith from. Who Itآ’s For The Icy Dock U6-1S-WBC is for anyone who needs a portable, lockable drive enclosure that is inconspicuous, functional, and, frankly, little else. Its USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b connections make it suitable for A/V professionals that demand the fastest data transfer speeds available for non-eSATA equipped computers. But its curiously sluggish transfers put a damper on that benefit. Being an Icy Dock, those on a budget should probably look elsewhere for their external storage solutions unless they absolutely need the IEEE 1394b interface.
Puts it very high on the price scale, and similar enclosures, sans IEEE 1394b, can be had for. Is the extra $160 worth it? We donآ’t think so. If you really, really want an Icy Dock, it should be noted that they released the at the beginning of February.
Icy Dock For Mac Pro
It not only has both the USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b interfaces, it also has the elegant styling of the previous and units we evaluated.