On the back you'll find a power switch, AC adapter plug and the USB cable plug. I was happy to see that the AC adapter uses a standard IEC power cable end going into it, instead of a specalized end.

One thing that let me down was the lack of a Firewire option on this enclosure. Although USB is great for burst transfers, it lacks the speed for solid sustained transfer. When doing tasks such as backing up your entire system, the option to have firewire would greatly decrease the amount of transfer time required to do this task. I see a lot of dual enclosures with USB and Firewire built in so I don't think it would hurt for Vantec to do this on any future dual-drive enclosures as it will help to appeal to a larger crowd.

Once your two hard drives are installed you are given two options of running them, either as JBOD or two single disks. With JBOD, or "Just a Bunch Of Disks", the capacities of the two hard drives are combined and your system displays only one physical hard drive. Example, if I put two 500GB hard drives in as JBOD, the system will show one physical 1TB hard drive. The controller inside the NexStar MX handles how the files are stored on the two drives when in this mode. For single disk mode, each hard drive inside the enclosure will shown up appropriately in your OS. Example, if I put two 500GB drives in, my OS will show two 500GB removable drives. Switching between the two modes is done by an easy to use labelled switch inside the enclosure.

While on the topic of drive modes, I would like to point out that since Vantec makes this a very home-friendly enclosure, it does not have all the other RAID modes that many other dual-drive enclosures have (such as mirroring). For the home user, not having to deal with that confusion during setup will make things very user friendly and easy to install. However, power users who are using this for a backup system may have certain RAID requirements they are looking for, such as mirroring, that the NexStar MX can not do. I think if Vantec were to release a future version of this enclosure with Firewire and more RAID options, they could have an enclosure that all the power users would bite at!

To make backups easy and hassle free, a copy of ArcSoft's TotalMedia Backup is also included. This allows for backing up of all your media and personal files through a simple or advanced backup option. This way you can make sure that only what you want backed up gets copied! To take away the "remembering" part of backups, you can automatically schedule full or incremental backups at set times (daily, weekly, monthly, etc)!

Installation:
After removing four screws on the back of the NexStar MX, the entire aluminum casing slides off allowing your drives to be installed. Installation itself is easy, just slide each drive into the tray until the plugs meet firmly, then use the included screws to fasten them in! Note that you don't have to use two drives in the enclosure right away, so you can easily install just one and use the second slot to expand in the future.

(Note the JBOD label pointing to the switch that controls JBOD or independent drive operation)

After that, the enclosure itself requires no drivers and will be detected in Windows as a removable device. For easy backups, the ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup could be installed at this time if you wish.