USB 2.0, finally!!!

[StanFL]

Playing with this new Gigabyte GA-8IRXP (845 chipset DDR P4) board with the NEC USB 2.0 chip got the better of my curiosity. I snagged the beta WinXP USB 2.0 drivers from LittleWhiteDog and off to CrapUSA today to buy a 40 (5400 rpm) gig external USB 2.0 drive made by ACom. When I plugged it in it detected the hard drive as a Samsung so I immediately knew I didn't have a speed demon on my hands 🙂 I did a quick format of NTFS on it, copied about 6 gig of mp3's and movies to it immediately and was pleasantly surprised at how quick it went. I benchmarked it in SiSoft Sandra under both USB 2.0 and USB 1.1. The drive scores were 11727 and 943 respectively. Needless to say, I won't be plugging it back in to the USB 1.1 ports ever again.

The install was super easy. I just enabled the USB 2.0 in the bios. The mobo came with 4 usb 2.0 ports on a slot that goes in a vacant slot in your case. The other end has two plugs that plug into the mobo. They can be reversed so watch the polarity. Once I rebooted XP took care of everything else.

All in all, I like it and it's about damn time!

 

[Ionizer86]

USB2.0: Fun? Probably was a lot of fun for you. Practical? I don't know, because you probably could have gotten a much faster internal 40gb drive for the money. In any case, if your friends have USB 2.0 cards or USB 2.0 support on their mobos, that HDD would probably be quite practical 🙂

Have fun in any case 😀

 

[nortexoid]

i don't get what u were waiting for....i mean, look how long firewire drives have been available for now...

 

[samgau]

I've been waiting for the mobo manufacturers to use the USB 2.0 chips on newer motherboards... havn't seen any yet... 🙁

 

[SiLEighTy]

<< I've been waiting for the mobo manufacturers to use the USB 2.0 chips on newer motherboards... havn't seen any yet... 🙁 >>



Uhh, i have the usb 2.0 chipset on my MSI K7T266 Pro 2 RU.

So theres 1 or 2 out that have them already.

 

[christoph83]

Asus P4B266 has usb 2.0 as well.