USB 2.0? is it compatible with my mac?
- Thread starter herbg
- Start date
Mr Tea
Registered
Hey, herbg. I recently installed a SmartDrive USB 2 PCI card in my G4 Quicksilver running OSX 10.2.3. To work, it requires a recent version of the 'OMI_EHCI.kext' extension to be installed in System>Library>Extensions.
The most recent version available from SmartDrive (1.6) only gave me USB 1 transfer speeds, but I discovered that the installers for the Orange Micro USB 2 card (available at http://www.orangemicro.com/updateusb2mac.html) installed version 3.0 of the same extension, and this provides true USB 2 speeds when transferring files to and from an external USB 2 hard drive.
However, it's still far from perfect. Straight copying works fine, but anything more complex, like trying to archive items on the USB 2 drive with Stuffit or Disk Copy results in a COMPLETE SYSTEM FREEZE. That's right. Everything stops dead and the only solution is to force a restart with the buttons on the front of the box. I suspect that the problem relates to the release note on Orange's download page that says "Split isochronous transactions not supported at this time". This major shortcoming has discouraged me from investing in any further USB 2 peripherals, as split isochronous transactions seem like the kind of thing that might be involved in scanning or burning CDs, but I don't know this for sure. Any further info would be most welcome.
The most recent version available from SmartDrive (1.6) only gave me USB 1 transfer speeds, but I discovered that the installers for the Orange Micro USB 2 card (available at http://www.orangemicro.com/updateusb2mac.html) installed version 3.0 of the same extension, and this provides true USB 2 speeds when transferring files to and from an external USB 2 hard drive.
However, it's still far from perfect. Straight copying works fine, but anything more complex, like trying to archive items on the USB 2 drive with Stuffit or Disk Copy results in a COMPLETE SYSTEM FREEZE. That's right. Everything stops dead and the only solution is to force a restart with the buttons on the front of the box. I suspect that the problem relates to the release note on Orange's download page that says "Split isochronous transactions not supported at this time". This major shortcoming has discouraged me from investing in any further USB 2 peripherals, as split isochronous transactions seem like the kind of thing that might be involved in scanning or burning CDs, but I don't know this for sure. Any further info would be most welcome.