INTRODUCTION

   Many people who enjoy watching movies but don't really know much about technology have recently turned towards Blu-Ray players not only because of their very affordable price tags but also due to extreme simplicity, just drop the disk into the tray/slot, press play and that's it. I also used to do that, starting almost 14 years ago when i bought my first Philips DVD player and then with the EP35 HD-DVD player by Toshiba which although quite impressive and aggressively priced it eventually lost to the Blu-Ray format by SONY (it's worth checking out that story if you are not familiar with it). However during the last 5 years or so with the introduction of standalone hardware media players it became quite obvious that the next generation/future format would not be based on optical drives but in standalone media file formats capable of reproducing FullHD content like the extremely popular matroska video format (.MKV extension). RaidSonic has been manufacturing such media players for quite some time and their latest Icy Box IB-MP3011PLUS is more than enough to remind us of that.

   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.

   Just over a year ago RaidSonic introduced the Icy Box IB-MP3011HW hardware media player so the IB-MP3011PLUS is simply put its successor since name aside both units share many similarities. First and foremost both players feature the same aluminum enclosure so at first glance there's nothing to distinguish the MP3011HW from the MP3011PLUS. Both players also feature interior space for a single 3.5" disk drive and a convenient external card slot compatible with SD and MMC cards. There are however also quite a few improvements found on the latest MP3011PLUS such as the updated Realtek RTD1185 media decoding chip (compared to the quite older RTD1073+) which allows for 3D playback, an USB 3.0 host port, support for NFS/FTP protocols and an lighting fast 1000Mbit/s Ethernet port. Of course these differences are not what I’d call incredible and i believe that's also the main reason as to why RaidSonic launched the unit with this particular name but releasing a new and updated product at the same price range as the previous one is always a good thing to see. Just how good these improvements are well follow us to find out.