I recently decided that I was lacking storage, seeing as my harddrives were currently all below the "5%" free mark. Figuring out and deciding that you need more space is fairly easy, but when adding an intense amount of space and storage, you're looking at a lot of internal space "wasted." Aside from the drives themselves, I would still have to invest in either a SATA or IDE PCI adapter simply because my drives took all that are availably internally. I placed myself in a pretty bad position considering the fact that I had enough for one drive, and not enough to rebuild my current army of hard drives ranging from 20GB to 160GB. My current case, the Gigabyte Aurora, is plently large enough for plently more hard drives and PCI adpaters, but it would look pretty cluttered and complicated with all of them thrown in there, let alone with my future dual loops, video cards ... ahem. I did not want a new case, and I did not want to upgrade all my smaller drives. So, of course, Tagan was there to answer the call with a solution to using external harddrives. How genius. How come I didn't think of that?

Picking one isn't much easier than deciding to go for one in the first place. A lot of it is based on what type of hard drives you can store, as some want IDE and some want SATA, some want USB, some what Firewire/LAN. It's hard for any review site to declare a harddrive enclosure to be "top-dog" when most of it is hard drive specific and personal preference. So, I armed myself with a list of features I needed, a list of features I wanted, and a list of features that I surely didn't want or need. I started looking, and Tagan's caught my eye.

One of the enclosures that struck my eye (not literally, or a lawsuit would ensure before a review) was the Tagan IcyBox IB-351U. It seemed a like a lot of what I needed, a good bit of what I wanted, and very little of what I didn't. The more I compared features of the IB-351U the more I was convinced that this was exactly what I was looking for.

You can visit the Tagan website at www.Tagan.com. They have a nice line of varied enclosures as well as a nice selection of cases and other hardware for computers and such. Tagan is mostly known for their high-end power supplies, their watercooling-friendly high end PC cases, and similar produts. Without a doubt, one of the more varied companies for enthusiasts. They produce great solid units (various products) and maintain a high level of quality control, where problems can be identified and corrected in a short amount of time.

I would like to thank Tagan for supplying Chilly Reviews with the Tagan IcyBox IB-351U for review.