3.5"/ 5.25" USB 2.0 External Drive Enclosure
& USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card

Date Reviewed: May 30, 2002
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel
Price: ~$80 Enclosure & ~$30 Card
Company: Extreme PC Gear

USB 2.0 PCI Card:

The USB 2.0 PCI card is the other half that makes the enclosure work at the faster speeds. This particular card is based on the NEC chipset, which I found out after searching the net for info that this is the chipset that is the one to get. Actually, the only info I could find was on the standard NEC models and an Intel model which is used onboard Intel motherboards. This card has 4 external ports and 1 internal port (though I have yet to see an internal USB device, perhaps if you were going to rewire some USB ports to the front of your case).

In the box you get the PCI card, manual, and CD-ROM which contains drivers and such. The drivers are for Windows 2000 and earlier. After (stupidly) trying to find USB 2.0 drivers for Windows XP online, I discovered that XP automatically supports NEC based USB 2.0 cards. It is included in one of the windows update patches (which everyone should keep up to date which those anyone because of security bugs). The card didn't work right away for me which was why I was trying to find the non-existent drivers. However after moving the card to a different PCI slot, XP auto-detected it right away. For some reason, I've had things in 2000 work just fine, but when I switch to XP they refuse to run in the same slots and I have to shift things around. Weird...

Here's a screen shot of the menu. Because you are able to write to this device (obviously), you can't just yank it out of your USB port whenever you want (well you could but you would run the risk of corrupting your data), you must go through the menus to properly "unplug" the device so windows can finish writing any data to the drive and whatnot. Then you can safely unplug it from your system and power it down.

Also, if you plug the external enclosure into your older USB 1.1 ports, you get a friendly reminder saying that you aren't going to get the fast speeds. I did run some benchmarks just to see exactly how slow it was. Being an external device that might move around from computer to computer, it is certainly able to function with the older USB standard, however you aren't going to get anywhere near optimal speeds out of it.

Benchmarks:

The hard drive used was a 45GB IBM 75GXP 7,200RPM ATA-100 drive. Refurbished of course (I don't know a single person who's 75GXP drive hasn't died on them at least once). First I ran the benchmarks which it was connected to an internal IDE ATA-100 channel, then connected a the USB 2.0 port, and finally connected to a USB 1.1 port.

First up is the all to common SiSoft Sandra HD Benchmarks:

Internal	USB 2.0
USB 1.1

The USB 2.0 score is about half of what the internal score is, which can probably be attributed to maxing out the USB bandwidth, and I'm sure a small amount could be caused from overhead since USB is a generic style interface. Still, you can see how much nicer USB 2.0 is over the older 1.1 standard.

Continue To Page 3 For More Benchmarks & Conclusion -->