Interesting products - Icy Dock

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

I want to know what this community thinks of the various products from Icy Dock.(https://global.icydock.com/)

2

I use this and this in my Proxmox server and both of them have been working well for a few years now.

A few things worth mentioning:

  • The fan is relatively loud, but if you use SSDs, you might get away without using it at all.

  • I probably wouldn’t recommend using a 6 bay model with HDDs, I could imagine the drives will run quite hot being so close together, even when using the fan.

  • The Though Armor Series has a much more premium feel to it, because the case and trays are made of metal, while the Express Cage Series is mainly made of plastic.

3

A single or couple of products would be asking for opinions, feedback for the whole site and all products is probably spam!

4

Thanks for sharing your experiences. If I invested in one of these, I would definitely get the tough armor models and I would use SSD’s.
My next experiment will be with an HP ProLiant ML 350 in my home lab. The idea is to set the SmartRAID controller into HBA anode and use my MB839SP-B as a boot device. The problem I’m trying to solve is the ML350 doesn’t boot from any device connected to a SmartArray controller while in HBA mode.

5

Looking at the ML350 Gen 10, it has an SD card that should be bootable, and it looked like it had an SATA connection for boot drive or optical drive. You might need to buy a cable for this, but it looks like it is present (in the picture on the website).

What I did on my HP DL360p servers was put Hiren’s Boot CD on the SD card along with drivers and the flash utilities to do things like BIOS upgrade and baseboard management upgrade. Gives you a nice Windows PE environment to use some of these tools. Then I boot off of a different drive. But I understand what you are saying, my DL360e won’t boot from the HP 420 card when in IT mode, but it did have a couple of SATA ports for things like optical with the normal chipset that I used for the boot drive. I did need to solder in a power 4 wire cable and then used an SSD to make sure I didn’t draw too much extra power.