One thing should be absolutely apparent from this review: if you are a normal end-user this is not for you. There are no consumer motherboards out there that offer the connectivity needed to make the most of the ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB720M2K-B. Your best bet would be to stick to PCIe cards with onboard slots and a software raid solution for most scenarios. There are plenty of 4-way solutions out there with companies like Asus and AsRock providing these at a fairly affordable price point—or if U.2 is your thing, you could simply buy an NVMe to Mini-SAS adapter. That having been said, while the MB720M2K-B is very expensive when viewed in a retail consumer environment, if your organization has U.2 and is looking to utilize that connectivity, it would boil down to fairly expensive U.2 enterprise level SSDs instead.

If you see the need to spend $500 or more on a special PCIe x16 hardware RAID controller and around $100 just on the cables, and are looking to take some seriously high performance M.2 NVMe SSDs to create an incredibly fast RAID array with hot-swap functionality for your workstation, then the $400 are certainly a tangible option because it could be the difference between relatively long down times or a quick response time and thus uptime in whatever mission critical environment you are running.

From an end-user perspective that is the framework in which the ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB720M2K-B really starts providing value. Things become much clearer as soon as you consider expensive, critical commercial systems and scenarios where downtime or data loss could mean the difference in a make or break scenario. Elevate that further into a government or military setting and, well, you get the idea. That is where the ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB720M2K-B aims to deliver, and as simple as the value proposition may seem: it does.