Silverstone MS06 2.5″ Docking Station Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Silverstone MS06 (SST-MS06B) 2.5″ USB 3 Enclosure and hot-swap drive bay won’t cost you much considering how useful it is. Sure, there are cheaper drive enclosures, but they won’t bring you the same features. This easy to use system will only cost you £23.99 at Overclockers UK and £23.70 at Scan Computers. Our US-based readers can find it for $39.00 at PC Case Gear.

Overview

Silverstone have created a great product with the MS06 USB 3.0 enclosure with docking-bay, there is absolutely no doubt about it. The build quality is great, from the one-piece aluminium enclosure around the drive, all the way to the mechanical release mechanism for the docking station. Inside the enclosure, Silverstone used a foam pad to keep the drive firmly in place during transport; after all this is a mobile enclosure.

The SATA connector used is very tight and I was worried to break it when I removed the test drive from the enclosure. It is secured in the PCB with plastic nobs and the soldering points are solid and help too, I still see this as a point where Silverstone could improve upon the enclosure. But then again, this isn’t an enclosure you’d swap the drive in very often, and most likely you’ll just be using it with the same internal drive from start till end.

To not waste half the USB header due to the internal connection to the motherboard by the docking bay, Silverstone added a USB 3 front-panel port. This both makes sure that you don’t waste half the connection and that you’ll still have a front USB 3 port even though your motherboard maybe only has one USB 3 header.

The screws used on each end of the enclosure are really tiny and it’s unlikely that most people have a screwdriver small enough for them. Not to worry, there is one included and it works far better than expected. Silverstone also added an extra enclosure screw in case you ever drop one and can’t find it again; not an unlikely scenario considering their tiny size.

There is no doubt that this is the fastest USB 3 enclosure that we’ve tested so far and we saw speeds up to 433MB/s while reading from our test SSD. The write speeds barely showed any effect from the SATA to USB3 conversion and came in around the same 300MB/s mark seen with this drive on a native SATA connection.

Pros:

• Hot-swap docking bay
• Aluminium case
• UASP transfer speeds
• Pure USB system for maximum compatibility

Cons:

• Possible weak-point at the SATA connector.

“Silverstone MS06 is quite possibly the best solution for a high-speed mobile storage solution with a docking bay. It convinces equally though transfer speeds, build quality and price.”

Thanks to Silverstone for providing this review sample