On the front of the enclosure the vertical strip down the left side houses all the indication LED’s and the reset button. Each bay has an LED which indicates drive power, activity and if it has failed. There are also two central LED’s which indicate a fan failure and an overheat condition. Being as the MB453 is right in the front of my case and in clear view I will also be a little picky on the visuals of this product as well. The stickers that go around the LED’s for each bay on this unit were not straight and I found this is fairly easy to notice since they are across from the silver locking arm on each removable bay. When stickers are mounted beside something that is perfectly level your eye is quick to notice that they don’t match. You may or may not care about something like this but I do look at the “fit and finish” of items that are visible, so I will mention it.

  
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Lastly in this section I'd like to touch on the connection panel on the back of the MB453. This panel houses three SATA connectors, 1 SATA power connector, two molex power connectors, a temperature alarm adjustment switch and other data pins. I found it interesting how the power pins were not all molex, or all SATA. I think conforming to one style would make it easier for those of us with modular power supplies. I personally run a rack mount case so my internal space is very tight and limited when it comes to running alot of cables. I had to use an additional power cable on my power supply just to connect the two molex ends. If the power conections were kept to all SATA power plugs for example then only one cable from most power supplies would be required. This would in turn save space for tight cases such as mine. The temperature alarm threshold can be set by a 3 position switch which is on this back panel. You have the option of 45, 55, or 65 Celsius. Lastly, the DATA pins can be hooked up to server motherboards or monitoring devices to monitor the hard drive statuses, power, access, temp fail, fan fail and reset. All the pin outs for these are on a large sticker on the top of the enclosure.

  
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Installation:
Installation for the MB453 is fairly straightforward. It is just like installing an optical drive but twice as high. You'll want to watch the depth of your case though. Without the fan installed the MB453 case stretches back 180mm. This increases to 220mm with the fan. Once installed in the case you simply plug your three power cables in and connect the SATA cables to the drives. The back panel is very clearly labeled so wiring it up isn't a difficult guessing game.

Testing:
In terms of testing there really is no official testing that can be done on the Icy Dock MB453. Since the hard drives are basically wired directly through the MB453 to your motherboard there is no data transfer speed loss when using this docking system.