Just had an illuminating experience with USB1 and 2 that I thought I'd pass
on.

I've had a USB1 enclosure for over a year, which I use to copy small
quantities of files from client's pc's to other locations.  I also bought a
USB2 enclosure a couple of weeks back which I hadn't so far used.

Today, I plugged the USB1 enclosure into my new motherboard, which only has
USB2, but which is backwards compatible with USB1, as we know.

I started to transfer a 2.3G file across to my pc and was told that the time
required would be 50 minutes.  I watched it for a few minutes to make sure
that the forecast time was correct, and that it hadn't locked up, and sure
enough it was, as the remaining time began to slowly wind down as it copied.

When it got to 47 minutes to go, I'd had enough.  I ripped the drive out of
the USB1 box and threw it into the USB2 box.

Then I started again.  It finished the job in 2 minutes. That's right, TWO
minutes.

Only beef I have about the whole USB enclosure thing is that the boxes are
still hellish expensive in New Zealand.  My wholesale buy price here is
about $150NZ, (for the box alone, NOT the HDD as well) so someone's creaming
it.  But that's usually the story when the demand isn't big, I guess.

One other point - the USB1 enclosure caused a fuss with my (still
probationary!) XP Pro system, as it wasn't recognised, and the sytem didn't
like any of the drivers that came with it.

However, no fuss with the USB2 box on XP - it was spotted and accepted with
no effort on my part.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]


----- Original Message -----
From: "A Cassel" Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] USB Info


> With Intel chipsets, you should show an "USB 2.0 enhanced host
> controller" in device manager (under universal serial bus controllers)
> if USB 2 is supported.  I would suppose other chipsets would show
> something similar.

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