With USB 2.0 devices slowly trickling out to the market, we are finally getting a glimpse of USB 2.0's faster connection speed.
At a 460Mbps transfer rate, USB 2.0 blasts USB 1.1's 12Mbps speed. The OrangeMicro Orange USB 2.0 PCI Hi-Speed Board (AU$285) and the OrangeMicro OrangeUSB 2.0 Hi-Speed PC Card are two of the first add-in cards to bring a fast data rate to desktops and notebooks, respectively.
Installing the PCI board was easy. OrangeMicro assumes that you have an Internet connection, since the included installation software needs to get online to download the drivers.
Once the software was installed on a Dell Dimension XPS, Microsoft Windows 2000 recognised the board without a hitch. The installation process is basically the same for the four-port PC Card device: the only difference is that the PC Card needs its own detachable AC adaptor.
Since there is only a handful of devices on the market that take advantage of USB 2.0, our ability to test the PCI board was somewhat limited. We managed to obtain the new QPS Que USB 2.0/1.1 USB CD-RW drive, which is a convenient testing device because the burn speeds scale down if you connect the drive to a USB 1.1 port. According to QPS, with a USB 2.0 connection, the drive will burn at 8X and with USB 1.1 it burns at 4X. Our testing found this to be true.
At USB 1.1 (or 4X), we burned an audio CD in 16 minutes 31 seconds; at USB 2.0 (8X), the time was almost exactly halved at eight minutes 46 seconds. Clearly, this is not as large a jump as the pure difference in transfer rate between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0.
Nevertheless, because we did see an increase in the rate at which we copied the CD, we can attest that for this particular product, the OrangeMicro OrangeUSB 2.0 PCI Hi-Speed Board provided a significant throughput increase.
Orange USB 2.0 PCI Hi-Speed Board
Company: Orange Micro
Price: AU$285
Distributor: Pineapplehead Australia
Phone: 1800 657 601
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