Linguist and psychologist Noam Chomsky refers to the phrase 'cellar door' as the most linguistically pleasing in the whole English language. We do wonder if he's heard the phrase 'icy dock'…

We digress. Icy Dock's MB982SPR-2S allows up to two 2.5-inch hard storage drives to be converted to 3.5-inch form factor. Handy for saving space inside smaller cases, keeping your storage bays nice and neat, and especially useful if you want to use two SSDs in a RAID setup.

Inside the MB982SPR-2S, two 2.5-inch drives can be connected simultaneously, the Icy Box itself connecting to the SATA and power connectors.

Using a dial on the back, you can choose from RAID0, RAID1, BIG and Port Multiplier modes in hardware and software modes. And here's where the problems start.

We found setting up any RAID array in hardware mode impossible, as the Icy Dock won't reset properly even with updated firmware. With the third party software that we had to track down ourselves, the process is still riddled with crashes and disappearing drives.

For £56 this should be much easier. Avoid.

Upgrading and replacing computers over the years can leave you with a stockpile of unused components. If you have an old hard drive lying around, then rather than leaving it to gather dust, you can put it to good use as an external hard drive.

While there are already quite a few hard drive cases on the market that will accommodate an internal laptop hard drive, the Enermax Jazzmate stands out from the crowd thanks to some very handy features that its competitors have left out.

The first thing you notice about the case is how small it is - not much bigger than the 2.5-inch hard drives it can hold. This turns it into a very useful portable drive that you can carry around with you without much trouble.

The casing is so much smaller than the other hard drive enclosures you'll come across because of its 'Cooling Plus' mesh design, which allows air to flow freely through the case, efficiently cooling the drive.

Another nice feature of this case is that you don't need to screw or unscrew anything. You simply unlock the case, slide off the top and place your hard drive inside. It's so simple to add and remove hard drives that you can swap them at will – ideal if you have a number of otherwise unused drives going spare.

Adding hard drives couldn't be easier, and it only took a couple of seconds to fit a hard drive, close the case, plug it into the computer and then access the files.

Even better, the Enermax Jazzmate comes with a USB 3.0 cable. Plugging this into a USB 3.0 port gives fantastic speeds, almost comparable with internal drives.

The price is impressive as well – if you've already got a spare hard drive you can have a fully functioning large capacity external drive for only £20. If your laptop refuses to boot, this is a very affordable way of recovering your files – just take out the drive, insert it into the Jazzmate and connect it to a working PC.

Hard drives docks are not exactly new, or that easy to get excited about. That said, Sharkoon's latest addition to its Quickport family, the Home edition, is offering something a little different compared to the competition.

As well as offering the ability to drop in and pull out a 3.5-inch drive on the fly, this DVD player sized device allows you to have a 2.5-inch drive, USB drive and SD card all slotted in at the same time.

The Quickport Home has a whole host of connectivity options and the ease with which you swap in and out drives is, for the most part, thoroughly impressive and rather useful.

I say for the most part because the 2.5-inch bay wasn't as forgiving of the different drive shapes as we'd like. Both our traditional 2.5-inch laptop drives got stuck and had to be removed with pliers as the release mechanism missed part of the housing.

The best part, though, is the fact that you can use an eSATA connection to attach the device to your PC. This enables much faster transfer of data from your SATA drives housed in it. With the average read speed dropping from 55MB/s to 26MB/s when you switch from eSATA to USB 2.0, the difference is obvious.

Overall, £53 is rather pricey for what is essentially a hard drive caddy. Still, it's a functional device and if you're in the market for a hot-swappable caddy this won't do you too much wrong. If you're not using 2.5-inch drives that is…

This is where reviewing things in PCFormat can get a mite tricky. How does one review a 2.5" hard drive bracket?

Well, to be honest it's my fault for thinking that StarTech's hot-swappable, rear-mounted hard-drive rack sounded interesting. And, to be honest, it kind of is interesting. But I'm still not entirely sure that it's that useful.

If it was only a tenner, or if it came in a pack of two to allow seamless drive switching between two machines then I could get behind its rather niche usage model. But as it is, it's kind of only really relevant for someone regularly testing different laptop hard drives.

In that situation it's incredibly useful. You mount the rack in a spare expansion slot on the rear of your case, hook up the SATA info and power leads, and you can drop in 2.5-inch drives on the fly.

It could be handy for smaller chassis with fewer hard-drive mounts inside, and for those SSDs that come without mounting brackets to slot them into 3.5- inch bays.

I've tested it with a couple of different SSDs and it didn't once have a problem with any of the extended casings around the SSD SATA points.

In terms of security, you could secure your machine by having your boot drive in the bay at the back and remove it whenever you're not at your rig. Handy for the LAN party then.

It's a well-made, smartly designed, and simple piece of tech. It's reassuringly solid, the drives fit snugly and it just works.

There's really not a lot else you could ask of the StarTech bracket, apart from maybe a wee price cut. But then products in niche markets are always a little bit pricey…

The USB 3.0 interface has now become a prime selling point of today's higher-end motherboards. As such, unless you've bought a new mobo in the last few months, you're not going to have USB 3.0 on your existing rig.

If you want it, you're going to have to fork out for a new mainboard at the pricier end of the market. Unless, that is, you opt for the new PCI-E expansion cards, such as this one from Icy Box.

It's a simple upgrade for anyone wanting the new, speedy interface in their existing rig and at £45 it's not going to break the bank. Sure, it costs a little more than equivalent USB 2.0 adaptors, but shopping around it looks like it's only by around a tenner.

Just drop the expansion card into a spare single-lane PCI-E slot, connect it up to the power supply with a molex cable (remember them?) and you're up and running.

It's sporting the exact same NEC chip that the motherboard manufacturers are putting on their latest boards and there's no discernible drop-off in performance between them.

Both offer speeds way above what the venerable USB 2.0 interface can manage, but by doing it this way you don't have to replace any major components. Still, an expansion card such as this is only really necessary if you're desperate to get on the bandwagon early and start buying up any USB 3.0 products you can find.

Realistically, by the time it's got the sort of market penetration to make it a necessity, you'll be in the market for a new mobo. And by then USB 3.0 will be ubiquitous across the board.

USB 3.0 is here and it's here to stay. It's around twice as fast as the old, faithful USB 2.0 transfer speeds and is backwards compatible with both of the last two generations of the Universal Serial Bus.

Now, though, we're actually starting to see USB 3.0 devices crop up to take advantage of this new interface, and here is Icy Box's first USB 3.0 caddy.

The bonus of the external caddy is that you don't need to have a specifically compatible hard drive in order to take advantage of the USB 3.0 speed boost. All you need to do is drop in any SATA drive, hook it up to a USB 3.0 port and you're laughing. Well, you're transferring data faster than you would have done normally and you might possibly be smiling while you're doing it…

Anyway, this is a simple, sleek, brushed aluminium caddy that's easy to get going almost straight out of the box.

Its appearance isn't exactly stylish, however, with the manufacturer preferring the more anonymous black shell, designed not to be seen and, thankfully, not to be heard either.

And there's no doubting that it's quick, offering almost twice the read/write speeds of USB 2.0 and way, way superior burst speeds.

Our only issue is the fact that, as Icy Box's first USB 3.0 caddy, it's got a bit of price premium on top. At a cost of £43, it's around twice the price of equivalent USB 2.0 caddies.

Here we've got an easily swappable 2.5" HDD caddy, hence the imaginative product title, the Choiix 1.2.3. Swapper.

And simple it most definitely is with the device pulling apart easily and only a couple of rubber grommets holding the drive in place and the caddy together. All you do is plug your li'l HDD into the base, slide the plastic case over the top of it and replace said grommets.

I was pleasantly surprised at how solid the Swapper was when assembled. I hardly expected the rubber bits to hold out where normal screws would have been used, but there was no problem at all.

The only problem I have with the Swapper though is that it will only cater for standard SATA 2.5" HDDs and is completely incompatible with the same size of SSD.

Now, we know SSDs are still rather expensive and a little too pricey to wave around as portable storage, but there have got to be early adopters out there not willing to keep their first gen SSDs in their systems at home.

Still, it's a simple plug 'n' play beastie and does its job admirably.

The Macally Hi-Speed might not be the cheapest 3.5-inch SATA drive enclosure, but it is pretty, looking like a mini Mac Pro.

Fitting a SATA drive is easy, but requires some disassembly and isn't ideal for regular drive swapping. It's got an excellent range of connectivity options, offering USB, eSATA and FireWire 400.

You can daisy-chain FireWire peripherals, so this option is available even if you don't have spare ports.

Also included is a backup app, but bizarrely for a device that looks like a Mac, it's PC-only.

Clickfree's products are designed to be as convenient and easy to use as possible, and the Transformer certainly achieves those laudable goals.

Once you've set up the application to suit your needs, performing backups is as simple as plugging it in. Restoring files back to your computer is easy too, although adding external drives to your back-up list could be more instinctive.

The Transformer can back up to any external USB hard drive, which is handy as your needs expand, but for all its strengths, £50 is pricey for a device with no storage of its own. It could be more configurable, too. For example, you can choose to back up photos, but you can't narrow that down to JPEGs only.

Clickfree's Transformer won't clone your hard drive or back up your apps, and if you already run an automatic back-up system, this device isn't designed to replace it. If you don't, though, it's a good means of securing your irreplaceable files and media.

Designed for a 2.5-inch SATA drive the HandyBook hard drive enclosure opens like a book at the push of a button.

And if you're likely to do a lot of drive swapping, you can fit your bare drive without screws or fix it into place with the supplied screws and screwdriver.

You also get a stand, USB and eSATA cables, and a USB-to-5V lead in case your USB port isn't enough.

However, its plastic construction probably couldn't take many knocks, so it's probably better off staying on your desk.