Quick Look: ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB840M2P-B NVMe Mobile Rack

[Darksaber]

The ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB840M2P-B allows you to install M.2 NVMe drives into a full tower chassis and provides potent cooling as well as accessibility with its solid material mix. This gives enterprise or government environments the ability to incorporate enterprise-level NVMe drives quickly and easily.

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[Zareek]

$84 for a fancy bracket???

Don't get me wrong, I love ICY DOCK products. They are excellent, high quality, usually really innovative. Usually, a bit more expensive but typically worth the extra cost. This is just absurd, way too much more than their less innovative, lower quality competition. I might be able to consider half that price. That is still 3 times the cost of something basic that accomplishes the same task from a competitor. I know you lose the external removal ability but really how many people need that anyway? How many use cases are there for this? Not many, too bad, nice design wasted with an absurd price point. How very Apple Mac Pro wheels of them.

 

[Caring1]

$84 for a very over complicated dock.
I expected that it could be opened and the drive removed directly so another can be slid in place, without the sled.

 

[destruya]

The only way this would be worth it is if ID had bothered to do something like put a USB 3.2 Type-C port on the "cartridges." Having dual-interface would've made them *almost* worth the extra cost. Also, not many people are going to want something they have to reach around the back of their case to use. Most of their products seemed to revolve around people having 3.5 and 5.25" expansion bays, and those are now rare.

 

[Valantar]

$84 for a very over complicated dock.
I expected that it could be opened and the drive removed directly so another can be slid in place, without the sled.

And what would you do with the removed drive? Stick it in your pocket? At the very least you'd need a 3rd party protective case, which ... well, if your product to use with another product requires the separate purchase of a third product, you're doing something wrong. m.2 drives are far, far too fragile to be handled without any type of sled in a hot-swap environment, especially seeing how removing it would require actually gripping the PCB itself. IMO this looks like a reasonable solution for what it's trying to do.

This is clearly a niche product for a niche use case, but it looks well designed and well built and should do what it's intended for nicely. Paying a small premium for that is expected and perfectly fine.

The only way this would be worth it is if ID had bothered to do something like put a USB 3.2 Type-C port on the "cartridges." Having dual-interface would've made them *almost* worth the extra cost. Also, not many people are going to want something they have to reach around the back of their case to use. Most of their products seemed to revolve around people having 3.5 and 5.25" expansion bays, and those are now rare.

That would make this massively expensive, as it would require a carrier PCB in the sled with some sort of PCIe switching to enable swapping between PCIe and USB use cases. I suppose they could make a removable "end cap" for the sled containing a USB-to-NVMe bridge chip, but that sounds like a niche within a niche within a niche, and something that would be easily lost, so it doesn't make much sense in this context.

 

[Condelio]

i got my hopes super high after seeing the promotional image with a Dan a4 sfx chassis. nice product, but not for a4-sfx i guess

 

[Spencer LeBlanc]

Maybe if it had 4 slots I'd buy it for that price. Not for a single drive though.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Forgive the necropost but this product is still available. I'm surprised at the negativity being expressed for this dock. True, it's a niche product (most ICY Dock products are, being mostly aimed at the Enterprise sector) but that doesn't mean it's no good.

I've found it to be extremely useful for me. I image my boot drive periodically but imaging is no good if you don't know if the image can be restored. The only way you can test the restorability of an image is to restore it. However, if you attempt to restore an image to your only working boot drive and the restore fails, you are dead in the water and you will have start over from scratch. Better is to remove the drive you just imaged, replace it with another drive, then try to restore the image to it. If the image fails, you still have the original drive to fall back on.

The test should be repeated every now and then to make sure an update to the OS hasn't messed up the ability of your imaging program to make viable images.

I can swap out boot drives in my laptop in around a minute. But it takes 13-25 minutes to swap out the boot drive in my desktop computer, depending on how shaky my old, arthritic hands are that day, because I have to unplug three display port cables and a power cable from the graphics card and pull the card to get to the boot drive. Then, after swapping drives, reverse the procedure to get to where the image can be tested.

With this dock, after shutting down the computer, I can remove the tray the SSD is installed in (I don't even have to move the computer) and replace it with another tray with another SSD installed in it in a minute or less (you can buy extra trays for this dock; I have three with drives installed I keep in rotation). After creating an image, I shut down the computer, swap trays, then boot the computer into a Ventoy drive with my imaging program in it and restore the image. Easy peasy, slick and sleazy.

My only complaint is the pins of an SSD installed in the tray are exposed to possible damage when stored out of the dock. A simple, protective cap included with the tray would have been a good Idea. I made a storage case for two trays from a small, flat plastic box with a hinged lid I dug up and added some antistatic foam I had on hand i it to cradle two trays.

For me, since I swap my boot drive to test my latest image on the first Saturday of each month, I found this to be well worth the money.

 

[Condelio]

Forgive the necropost but this product is still available. I'm surprised at the negativity being expressed for this dock. True, it's a niche product (most ICY Dock products are, being mostly aimed at the Enterprise sector) but that doesn't mean it's no good.

I've found it to be extremely useful for me. I image my boot drive periodically but imaging is no good if you don't know if the image can be restored. The only way you can test the restorability of an image is to restore it. However, if you attempt to restore an image to your only working boot drive and the restore fails, you are dead in the water and you will have start over from scratch. Better is to remove the drive you just imaged, replace it with another drive, then try to restore the image to it. If the image fails, you still have the original drive to fall back on.

The test should be repeated every now and then to make sure an update to the OS hasn't messed up the ability of your imaging program to make viable images.

I can swap out boot drives in my laptop in around a minute. But it takes 13-25 minutes to swap out the boot drive in my desktop computer, depending on how shaky my old, arthritic hands are that day, because I have to unplug three display port cables and a power cable from the graphics card and pull the card to get to the boot drive. Then, after swapping drives, reverse the procedure to get to where the image can be tested.

With this dock, after shutting down the computer, I can remove the tray the SSD is installed in (I don't even have to move the computer) and replace it with another tray with another SSD installed in it in a minute or less (you can buy extra trays for this dock; I have three with drives installed I keep in rotation). After creating an image, I shut down the computer, swap trays, then boot the computer into a Ventoy drive with my imaging program in it and restore the image. Easy peasy, slick and sleazy.

My only complaint is the pins of an SSD installed in the tray are exposed to possible damage when stored out of the dock. A simple, protective cap included with the tray would have been a good Idea. I made a storage case for two trays from a small, flat plastic box with a hinged lid I dug up and added some antistatic foam I had on hand i it to cradle two trays.

For me, since I swap my boot drive to test my latest image on the first Saturday of each month, I found this to be well worth the money.

hey! thanks for your inputs! it's never too late