good external hard drives (e.g. WD Elements)?

[Mick M.]

--- On Fri, 7/17/09, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

> What you get from a brand name is the quality and looks of
> the plastic
> enclosure, and maybe power supply (internal or external
> etc).
> 
> But in the end, you have a normal hard drive inside
> (Western Digital
> or Seagate, most of the time), and a USB-to-IDE _chipset_.
> 
> That's what you should care about.
> 
> Performance and reliability between different usb-to-ide
> chipsets varies widely.

> FC
>

Hi Fernando;
  What you say is true, but almost useless.

True in that the chipset is the main thing, useless because they don't tell you what chipset the thing uses.

All you get is "Marketing Speak? on how great/reliable/fast/compatible the thing is.

By having people actually tell you that the "DYNEX DX-HDEN10 USB EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ENCLOSURE 3.5" etc, actually works just fine, you can go buy one.

Look on the box or on the webpage (newegg etc), no mention is made of chipsets.

Here is mine:
[mick at localhost ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 04b4:6830 Cypress Semiconductor Corp. CY7C68300A EZ-USB AT2 USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI

Which is actually wrong, the chip is  CY7C68300C not A.
I opened it up and looked.

Mick M.