Icy Dock MB981U3-1S Hard Drive Dock Review

Setup & Usage
Getting the MB981U3-1S setup is extremely easy. Just plug in your power, USB 3.0 cable and install your hard drive, remember this dock supports both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drives. For testing I installed a Corsair Force GT 120 GB solid state drive.

Icy Dock MB981U3-1S Hard Drive Dock

Once you have your drive installed you can go ahead and turn the dock on. For testing we will be using HDTune Pro’s file benchmark which will give us our sequential read and write speeds. We tested the hard drive dock in USB 2.0 mode, USB 3.0 mode and USB 3.0 UASP mode.

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As you can see there is quite a difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 speeds. Also keep in mind the speed of the dock also depends on the speed of your hard drive installed. If we had happened to use a 3.5-inch SATA drive instead of our solid state drive our scores would have been lower. USB 3.0 UASP mode can easily be activated with your motherboards companion software.