Conclusion
All four products worked flawlessly and they allow technical users to bridge the gap between PC components and specific applications.
Accusys' InneRAID Slim SATA ACS-75211 is a stand-alone RAID 1 solution for two 2.5" SATA hard drives in a 3.5" form factor. While it may not be a high-performance solution, Accusys' device offers low thermal and noise levels. The InneRAID performs almost like a single hard drive would, but requires only one SATA port and a single 3.5" drive bay. However, we found the price tag of $300 to be too much for a solution for a simple RAID 1 configuration (with only a slight impact on performance), which also has to be managed with an inflexible serial port.
Icydock sent us a state-of-the-art enclosure for 3.5" SATA drives, and it works either with USB 2.0 or Firewire 800. It is not meant to be portable at all, as it has a combined weight of more than four pounds if you add the power supply to the equation. But its design allows for high-level passive cooling, and can even keep a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive cool. The price tag of $120 isn't a bargain, but it's acceptable. However, it still bottlenecks the Raptor, which is why we recommend eSATA for high-performance hard drives.
We will certainly remember the Wiebetech Combo Dock v4 and SATA Dock v4, and that's not just because they can accommodate UltraATA or SATA hard drives with USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 connections. What stood out was the extremely high price for the optional Combo Adapters ADA v4, which allow users to hook up any ATA-compatible drive to the Combo Dock v4, including IDE/ZIF, CF, HD-IDE, SATA-to-IDE, PC Card or Microdrives. But while I'd love to equip all Tom's Hardware Guide test labs with this ultimate adapter kit, $749 for the adapters plus $150 for the Combo Dock v4 is excessive.
