Once the unit is assembled and powered on, your Operating System should take care of the rest - unless you need to install drivers. 

     Of course Windows XP and Windows Vista won't need drivers, and here is what the drive properties looked like after we formatted the disk. While there are two separate Hitachi hard drives in the enclosure, this shows us that the JBOD is functioning properly. The one Terabyte is being added to the 750 Megabyte for a total drive space of 1.59 Terabytes after format. 

     I used HD Tach's full benchmark routine to test the performance of the setup. Since the I Series only has a USB 2.0 interface, the 35 Megabyte per second transfer rate is all we can expect to see. The burst rate of 36.3 Megabytes per Second is yet another cap of the USB interface. Close examination of the read performance line shows an anomaly at the 749 Gigabyte mark. This can be contributed to the drives firmware handling data crossover from one drive to the other.

     We know the drives are capable of much more. However, the 320 megabit bandwidth of USB 2.0 is the limiting factor. In fact, it took HD Tach nearly 14 hours to test the entire 1.59 Terabytes of disk space.

     Conclusion....

    USB enclosures all perform about the same, again thanks to the somewhat limited bandwidth available on the USB 2.0 bus. What separates enclosures apart are their quality and simplicity of design. After all, if an enclosure broke the first time you tried to install your drives or if you had to consult the stand on your head while trying to get the enclosure back together, it wouldn't be worth your time, effort, and most importantly money to hassle with such a horrible product.

    Eagle has once again shown us that they know how to make a quality product and deliver it at a sensible price. The SECC chassis combined with the aluminum case and augmented with a 60mm cooling fan will certainly keep the installed hard drives from suffocating in their own heat. The included backup software is of course a 'lite' version but still has all the functions necessary to keep you prepared and protected from disaster.

     The RAID JBOD mode is a fantastic feature! The only drawback to JBOD would be replacing a drive down the road... Once a disk is full and it starts bleeding data to the second drive, if a drive fails or is just replaced, all of the data on that disk goes with it. Still, JBOD is a great way to recycle hard drives you're pulling out in a regular upgrade cycle or even to build a very large data pool with, like we did in our test here. 

Performance:	5 out of 5
Innovation:	4 out of 5
Quality:	5 out of 5
Stability:	5 out of 5
Aesthetics:	4 out of 5
Software/Drivers Pack:	4 out of 5
Overclocking:	N/A
Value:	4 out of 5
Project Skill Level (5 being most difficult)	3 out of 5