Introduction

Remember back when you were a kid and you thought that adults knew what they were doing? Then you reached that point, some time in your teens, when you realized that they are basically just as clueless as everyone else and that being an adult is just a massive disappointment. When you were a kid, there was this fantasy that somehow, when you come of age, all questions would be answered and you would know what the right thing is, automatically. Somehow, you thought people had better taste and a sense of what is good and what is counter-productive. Unfortunately, the opposite is true and the world is, in fact, filled with horrible ideas and populated by people who have Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Bridalplasty in their regular television viewing schedule.

Instead of being miserable, perhaps it is better to celebrate the few sparks of sanity and signs of progress that come our way. When television offers no escape, I simply turn to computer hardware for solace. As a reviewer, I can’t turn my brain off and not critique things constantly, but I treasure the moments that I find new pieces of hardware that are remarkably distinct and offer a solution to a problem that very few seem to pay attention to. Solid State Drives, for instance, offer a tremendous speed bump compared to traditional platter drives, improving transfer rates and application response times. While prices have gone down and are now within reach of mainstream users, larger capacity SSD drives still cost quite a bit more and limit the amount of programs you can install. Thankfully, Icy Dock has announced a new 2.5” SATA II SSD adapter that can help with this dilemma.

The Icy Dock MB882HX-1SB 2.5” SATA SSD Xpander Hybrid Adapter can bring new life to your previous generation SSDs. The MB882HX-1SB 2.5” SATA SSD Xpander Hybrid Adapter can double the sequential transfer rate of the HDD in the hybrid partition when paired with a moderate or 2nd generation 2.5” SSD. Once installed, the MB882HX-1SB Xpander Hybrid automatically creates two partitions: an SSD Hybrid partition, equal to twice the size of the SSD inside the adapter, and a useable storage partition, equal to the size of the HDD minus the SSD Hybrid partition. The MB882HX-1SB Xpander Hybrid works with any 2.5” SSD drive but for optimal performance, a 2nd generation or older SATA II SSD with a transfer rate of around 250MB/s paired with a 7200rpm HDD should be used.