USB2 for the masses (Fusion Flash FC-USB2-V)

Member Name: isvikthere

Product:	Fusion Flash FC-USB2-V
Date:	29/08/03 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: makes USB2 accessible to people with older systems, Low price

Disadvantages: There were some driver issues, Free PCI-slot needed

It seems that although the global economy is in a dip there is still no end to the (r)evolutions in PC-technology.

With 64-bit processors on the near horizon the speedrace between AMD and Intel seems to have come to a halt but in the meantime the other components inside your box still evolve, PCI-express is to be launched shortly developed to replace both the white PCI-slots and the AGP-port, the latter created especially some six years ago for graphics accelerators.

For harddrives Serial ATA is finally breaking through with motherboards and drives that support this technology now widely available.

As it is impossible for us common folk to chuck out our whole system just because a new technology in the computer's subsystems is introduced, luckily there are those hardware manufacturers that allow us to put new life and upgrade our ageing systems.

The product I'm presenting here today, the Fusion Flash USB2 card is such a solution. It upgrades computers with the outdated USB 1.1 technology onboard to the much better performing USB2 standard. With a maximum transfer rate of 480mbps, or 60Megabytes per second, USB 2.0 is 40 times faster than USB 1.1 !!

This speed increase is obviously not needed for hooking up your USB-mouse or -keyboard but for everything which has to do with the transfer of data. And here I am referring to external cardreaders, harddrives, CD-rewriters or even DVD-rewriters or whatever other storage peripherals are out there. For those devices the USB 1.1 speeds are simply not sufficient while with USB2 these devices can be accessed almost as if they were installed inside the box itself with no noticeable performance loss.

Contrary to the bigger brands of controller cards the likes of Adaptec and D-Link or even Promise, Fusion is offering us this upgrade to USB2-technology at a very reasonable price.


THE CARD

So what is it ? It is simply a PCI-card (to be installed i

n one of the white slots) that has four external USB2-slots and one internal connector. This internal connector is foreseen for those people that have USB connectors integrated in the front of their PC-tower, so those caseconnectors can be fed through this internal connector.

The card is controlled by a chipset made by VIA. As the USB2 technology is a patented design you have to agree to a copyright statement before installing the drivers.

There were some issues with some of the Microsoft Windows operating systems so you'd better go and download the latest driver from this site :

http://download.fusion-computer.com/dri_con.ht ml

I've got the card installed in my PC right now and for the time being I use it to connect my external 6 in 1 memorycardreader. But for the future I am considering buying a USB2 housing for an external harddrive which I could connect to this card and which would give me a wealth of external storage to play with.

An important thing to remember is that USB2 is backwards compatible with all USB 1.1 devices, of course only USB 1.1 speeds can then be used for transfers between this controller card and the external device as it is the slowest device that is the dominant one.

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