Opening the enclosure is as simple as removing two screws from the end and sliding the drive chassis out the end.  A single cable connects the two parts to operate the drive activity lighting and cab be detached if needed.

     To test the enclosure I have chosen a matched set of Maxtor 30 Gb hard drives.  The IDE controller board can take two different drives and supports a total storage of up to 1 terabyte!

     A closer look at the controller board reveals a power plug on the left and a removable IDE cable on the right.  I found leaving the IDE cable installed was easier to work with and installing the power cable after the IDE cables but before mounting worked best for me as well.

     Here you can see the two drives mounted and ready to go.  The two Maxtor drives allow plenty of ventilation between them for the fan to circulate air.

     On my first attempt I failed to make sure the power cables were clear of the fan!  With the top drive pulled forward, I was able to reposition the cabling to the right.  This is also a good way to reattach the drive activity cable if you removed it during the install.

     On my Windows XP build no drivers were required, simply plug the power in and switch on the drive.  Then plug the USB cable and allow things to plug and play.  The red lighting shown here indicates the drives are sitting idle.  When the drives are active the front light becomes a bright blue color.

     To test the enclosure I ran HD Tach RW Version 3.0.1.0 on each drive.  As the transfer rate is limited by the USB connection bandwidth and the actual drives, I was more concerned with the ability of both drives to perform at the same level.  As you can see above the two different drives performed nearly identically and show the USB 2.0 connection is more than capable of keeping up.

The Software:

     The enclosure also ships with a drivers disk that includes a Windows 98 driver, a soft copy of the manual and a simple one touch back up software.

     Or maybe not so simple;  Despite my best attempts at configuring the HID Button Manager v1.59, I could never coax more than this screen to appear until after I formatted the drives and the manual has no mention of the software at all.  The Initio name does match the drive names in hardware manager which reads these drives as Initio 6E030l0 USB devices.  As I use a Mirra server for backup I did not test this feature beyond basic functionality. 

     Some of the mystery and a more complete users manual that includes the software setup can be found on the Okgear website.  I also searched for instructions on creating a single logical drive out of the two drives using the built-in JBOD feature listed on the box with no success.  The Okgear manual lists the JBOD function as an automatic setup that is triggered by the physical disks in sizes over 128 Gb.  It would seem the repackaging may have reused some features found in other drives in this family and omitted others.

Conclusion:

     A dual 3.5" hard drive enclosure may not be for everyone but it does offer an amazing way to bring up to a terabyte of storage where ever you may go.  Actual performance is very dependent on the connection speed and the drive speeds but the IPC Queen enclosure can handle nearly any IDE drive combination you can throw at it.  The concept of taking a couple of older RAID drives like my Maxtors and giving them new life as a portable storage setup is just the tip of the iceberg.   The painful lack of direction on the software is balanced in part by the real fact that most users will not even need to use the drivers disk at all. Ultimately the size may be the only limiting factor and considering this unit replaces two separate enclosures the size is easy to forgive.  The IPC Queen Dual 3.5 USB HDD Enclosure provides a great two drive USB solution for a pretty great price.

Innovation:	9.0 out of 10
Performance:	9.0 out of 10
Quality:	9.0 out of 10
Stability:	N/A
Overclocking:	N/A
Software/Drivers Pack:	5.0 out of 10
Value:	9.5 out of 10
Overall Rating 9.0
Project Skill Level (10 being most difficult)	3 out of 10