USB 1 cabinet and DVD

[sybariten]

Hi,
i have this "EZQuest" USB cabinet here that someone just gave me. Its for 5.25" IDE units, but the thing is it's USB 1.1 .... i guess it was designed for cdburners, so i presume those will work in it, but what about a DVD reader or writer? Will the cabinet cope with that? Dont know the bandwidth needs or what the problems might be.

peace

[redwudz]

Probably too slow for DVD unless you like waiting a whole lot. OK for CD, but still slow. USB 1.1 = 12Mb/s , USB 2.0 = 400Mb/s, if I remember.

I had a EZQuest box a few years back for a external SCSI drive. It seemed to be well built.

[Raga]

USB 1.1 = 12 Mbps = 1.5 MB/s.
CD 48x = 7.2 MB/s. (1x = 0.15 MB/s)
DVD 8x = 21.6 MB/s. (1x = 2.7 MB/s)

(Give or take a bit.)

Counting from the above, you can burn CDs at 10x and DVDs at 0.55x over USB 1.1.

[waheed]

I think you're likely to suffer from buffer underuns and burn process failures with USB 1.1

I think USB 1.1 is actually limited to 11Mbps, and thats the theoretical maximum speed, not the average speed.

[rallynavvie]

By "cabinet" do you mean it can hold more than one device? Depending on the backplane and bridgeboard used you may be able to burn the same thing to all drives in the array. Some of those replicator stacks use something similar to RAID 1 to mirror the same data to all drives on the array and carry a pretty hefty cache depending on how many drives it is capable of running. However these units were mostly either SCSI or FireWire, I don't recall any being USB of either sort.

[sybariten]

Yo rallynavvie, no, it only takes one unit .... it looks a little something like this. Your idea was interesting though.

New problems have arised though; i havent actually been able to connect it to a computer at all. Well, i can connect it, but this is what happens:

• XP says "ding dong"
• A little speech bubble in the tastbar says "found new hardware, USB to CDRW unit" or something
• The wizard for hardware installation appears and asks if i want to install it, and if so, automatically (i choose yes coz i have no CD for this cabinet)
• Windows tries for a while and then fails to install the unit. No real explanation.

I thought XP would cope easily with this cabinet/drive. What do you do if you dont have the CD with drivers from EZquest ?

peace

[sybariten]

OK i think i got it working, first on a Win98 computer and then on my main XP machine.
I tried downloading drivers that are for win98, NT and 2000 (as noted on their webpage) and that seemed to do the trick. Not logical.
Besides, the drivers are described as to be for "the ice case" just because the case has a semi transparent colour ....... WTF? It does have a model name ("Boa"), so thats a really strange description.