Want to upgrade to USB 2.0

[Captain Satellite]

What do I need to do this, a card, right? Anybody have any recommendations? I want good quality - thanks!

[Richkut]

Coincidentally, I just performed this task last Friday! Go to www.cyberguys.com and order one of the PCI cards that will suit your purpose! I chose the $12.95 card with two external USB 2.0 ports and 4 internal pin header USB 2.0 connectors (the latter for a Soyo 9-in-1 3.5" Card Reader/USB Port). The Soyo only ran at USB 1.0 spec due to it being hooked up directly to my rather old PC motherboard. When I hooked it up to the USB 2.0 card pin headers and ran the enclosed software to load the ALi drivers, a typical card-to-PC transfer that used to take over 40 seconds now runs at about 3-5 seconds! I'd say that's quite an improvement, wouldn't you??!!

[ROF]

I bought three of these this AM.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815153001

[Captain Satellite]

Thank you, gentlemen! While I have you on the line, I'm going to add an external hard drive, any recommendations there?

[ROF]

Buy an internal hard drive and put it into a case like this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817155704

You'll save considerable amounts of money combining a case and your own drive.

[Captain Satellite]

If price weren't a concern, aren't there certain advantages and features found in an external hard drive?

[ROF]

Depends on the drive or more appropriately on the case that houses it. You can find better features and much larger capacity drives by combining an internal hard drive with an external casing. Cases run from $10-$50 depending on the manufacturer and features. You can find ethernet cases for about $20-$30 which includes either USB or Firewire in addition to an ethernet port for direct networking of your drive. There are also cases available in those price ranges that support 2 drives. Once you buy the case all you have to do is add an internal drive which is compatible with it's connections(IDE/SATA).

For $125 you could put together a 300GB External Hard drive. When 300GB became too small(it will eventually) you can just pull the 300GB drive and add a 2TB drive later on.