I recently bought a cheap generic USB to IDE adapter off of eBay. I read some reviews on it and it seemed an alright, not good or really bad, solution to hooking up some wayward hard drives I had lying around. I doesn't require any drivers as it just shows the hard drive as a USB mass storage device.
The drive shows up and mounts fine when I hook it up to my B&W (10.4.2) via the USB 1.1 ports. Sadly though, USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to make the adapter useful. The problem lies when I try to hook it up to my B&W via the USB 2.0 ports that I have on a PCI card. The card works because I've hooked up other 2.0 devices to it before and they worked fine. Unfortuneatly, the hard drive doesn't mount under usb 2.0. When I go under USB in the 'System Profiler', it eventually develops the spinning beach ball like it is waiting on something. In the Console, messages such as this show up:
Oct 21 18:24:03 Gantrithor kernel[0]: USBF: 12850.647 AppleUSBEHCI[0x1ac5000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 67, timing out!Oct 21 18:24:09 Gantrithor kernel[0]: USBF: 12856.647 AppleUSBEHCI[0x1ac5000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 67, timing out!
I even tried the adapter on a PC with USB 2.0 ports and it detected it just fine. Perhaps a more knowledgeable person can shed some light on this situation, eh?
I have a cheap USB 2.0 to IDE cable that's rather iffy on a USB 2.0 port. I got it from www.geeks.com The IDE end is blue with silver, oval lables that have USB 2.0 to IDE printed on. The CD-ROM that came with it says "The Expert of USB V 1.35B".
I've only used it on PC boxes so far and the results are mixed. VIA USB 2.0 controllers refuse to allow it to operate as USB 2.0. (WinXP see it as a USB 2.0 device connected to a 1.1 port!). An NEC USB 2.0 controller sees it as USB 2.0 but for reliable use I had to format the drive as FAT32 instead of NTFS.
Now for a possible solution. Stick a powered USB 2.0 hub between the cheap cable and the USB 2.0 controller. It seems to do the trick on 2000, haven't tried it on XP yet.
Sorry, but I don't yet have my $5.00 266Mhz Beige G3 (Rev.
up and running with OSX yet to try it out.
I do happen to have the silver cord, blue IDE end type. I think I have a NEC chipset USB 2.0 card. I'll have to post back when I manage to get it through a hub.
Hi,
I had the same problem. The adapter card is not powerful enough to juice up the attached device. Check to see if the card can take an AC adapter, but this may or may not help. It is most likely not the cable. Hope this helps.
TG