As I mentioned previously, I decided to go ahead with the purchase of the Icy Dock RAID enclosure. OWC had a note on its site that the unit would not support Western Digital drives unless they were "enterprise" products. Sure enough the two 1 TB WD drives I was planning to use would not mount. After quite a bit of fiddling, I picked up two Seagate 1 TB desktop drives, and they worked fine.
One note worth mentioning. The user manual for the Icy Dock notes that it can take up to an hour to index a 100 GB drive. When I first loaded my drives, I waited and waited for the indexing process to complete. Twelve hours later I was still waiting. Ultimately, I figured out that the manuals had omitted a key step in getting the drives up and running. After you insert the drives, you must partition the primary drive (at least with OS 10.6) even if it has been previously formatted and partitioned. After I figured this out, everything was fine.
I was originally prompted to make this purchase because I could tell that the EDI drive in my old enclosure was about to die. Sure enough it stopped working before I could complete the RAID install. Luckily I had most of my music back up on another drive and am now only having to reload a few new purchases.
The Icy Dock is fairly quite when being used for playback. The drives occasionally spin up to write or copy data, but that's about it. The unit has a speed adjustment on the cooling fan, which is handy for finding a not-to-noticeable setting.
Overall, I satisfied with this purchase (except for not being able to use my existing WD drives).
