INTRODUCTION

   Desktop Hard Drives were initially designed for people who either always wanted to keep a valid backup of their sensitive data or people who just preferred to have extra space outside of their systems so they could transfer them onto other systems with ease. Of course this changed with the introduction of portable hard drives and although desktop ones still feature higher capacities and data transfer speeds most consumers tend to prefer size over capacity and performance. Professionals however who work with several internal drives most of the time always had need for something more versatile and this is where docking stations came in a while back. Today docking stations have advanced quite a bit and also offer cloning capabilities between two drives something which can be very useful to some people especially professionals. The ICY BOX IB-121CL-U3 HDD Docking & Clone Station by RaidSonic is one such device and today we have it on our test bench.

     RaidSonic Technology GmbH was founded in Hamburg 1999. To realize our future visions and the rising requirements, RaidSonic moved to Ahrensburg (20 min. away from Hamburg) in May 2004.The capacity of our new warehouse, our permanent improving logistic and the expanded technical support lets us look into the future very optimistically. Our vision in a constantly growing IT market is to develop products, which will become your future dreams. Our extensive product portfolio, which we distribute Europe-wide, combines all internal and external solutions for the application of mass storage, for industrial and professional applications as well as for the private sphere, too. Through our all along increasing know-how, good results in research and development and our good cooperation with our long-time customers we could achieve a dynamic growth.

   RaidSonic is not a stranger to docking stations since they have released several models in the market (single, dual and quad ones) so far but what interests us here is that the ICY BOX IB-CL121-U3 is actually their 2nd attempt to create one with cloning abilities which means that we expect even more now in terms of performance (or at least we should). So just like every dual docking station out there the IB-121CL-U3 has room for two 2.5/3.5" drives (HDD/SSD) and as expected connects to your PC via USB 3.0 for the highest possible r/w transfer speeds. Unfortunately drive to drive cloning using the same device is still not perfected something which we will see later on, still it's a lot more convenient and that matters quite a lot to the people who have use for that specific feature. So time to see how the latest ICY BOX IB-121CL-U3 fairs against other similar units in the market.