Which external USB hard drive chipsets to buy and avoid?

[larry moe 'n curly]

Which brands of USB-to-IDE chips used in external USB drive enclosures
are the most reliable, and which should be avoided? I've read bad
things about Cypress chips, but what about others, such as Prolific?

What chips are used by the drive manufacturers in their external USB
drive enclosures? They wouldn't tell me.

 

[Geir Klemetsen]

Which brands of USB-to-IDE chips used in external USB drive enclosures
are the most reliable, and which should be avoided? I've read bad
things about Cypress chips, but what about others, such as Prolific?

What chips are used by the drive manufacturers in their external USB
drive enclosures? They wouldn't tell me.

Bought two datafab HDD enclosures that _should_ work with USB2, but none of
them did

At first the enclosure seems to work well, but after copying just some Kb
data, the enclosure doesn't respond and the computer hangs. Tried with
win98se, win2k and Xp. The two latters have native support for these
enclosures, but the same failure happends on all computer I've tested it
with.

 

[Jimmy]

Which brands of USB-to-IDE chips used in external USB drive enclosures
are the most reliable, and which should be avoided? I've read bad
things about Cypress chips, but what about others, such as Prolific?

What chips are used by the drive manufacturers in their external USB
drive enclosures? They wouldn't tell me.

I had a Bytecc USB external and generic external from Compusa, both had a
Prolific chipset, and both caused corrupt files. Bytecc has some drive
enclosures with a Ali chipset that may be better than the Prolific.

 

[Jim]

JMTC, but I'd be less worried about the USB chipset, and more worried about
the choice of interface. If you have a firewire port, do youself a favor
and get a "firewire" external enclosure, or at least dual mode
(USB+Firewire). Firewire, regardless of USB chipset, can be anywhere from
30-50% faster than ANY USB interface. If you're so concerned about
performance that you'd put this much effort into choosing the chipset (which
is a good idea), it only makes sense to spend $10-15 more and get firewire.
The performance difference between USB and Firewire makes concern over which
USB chipset almost not worth worrying about.

Jim

 

[mike]

Which brands of USB-to-IDE chips used in external USB drive enclosures
are the most reliable, and which should be avoided? I've read bad
things about Cypress chips, but what about others, such as Prolific?

What chips are used by the drive manufacturers in their external USB
drive enclosures? They wouldn't tell me.

I have a box with a cypress chipset. It works perfectly on everything
I've tried. xp, 98se, win2k and various ALI, NEC server chipsets.
Two other boxes with unknown chipsets behave badly on one or more
configurations. System hangs, corrupt data, random naps between
disk transfers...
mike

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