"It's the chip, stupid!" motto proved right

WHEN WE reviewed earlier this month the nice "Simpledrive Mini" an affordable 4GB USB 2.0 microdrive, I said that the only annoyance was the lack of a driver for Windows 98, as Simpletech relied on the "USB 2.0 Mass Storage" driver support built on Windows ME and later versions.

"But what about those of us with ancient 98SE systems, where the SD Mini would be an ideal portable way to save some old data and move it to a newer system", I thought. Good question.

The iTE8903 USB 2.0-to-IDE bridge chip inside the microdrive

Well, I learned long ago - in my days as an OS/2 user in the early to mid-90s- one of my favourite mottos: "It's the chipset, stupid!", with that meaning that the brand and model of a device is often not very relevant when it comes to drivers availability. More often than not, there's a plethora of hardware sold under different brands that in reality and under the hood use the same controller chips, or graphics chips, or bridge chips, -you name it, depending on the kind of device it is-. And it's such chip inside what is important, not the fancy cases, the bundled software, or the coolers or even the printed circuit board layout.

So, more often than not a driver written for a specific chip or chipset will work just fine on another device using the same chip or chipset, unless the driver programmer included a specific check looking for a certain "device ID" on the PCI bus (or USB bus), thus refusing to work on a device of a different brand or model. But, luckily for us, instances of this are very rare.

So here was I, receiving e-mail from INQ readers all month, asking "where are the Windows 98 drivers?", or "Did you obtain the 98se drivers for the SD Mini?". As seen in the picture above I found on my review that the device uses an ITE8903 IDE-to-USB2.0 bridge IC inside, and that such bridge chipset DOES have a Windows 98 driver, according to the chip manufacturer. Only that they never sent that drivers package to me, even while I asked them for a download URL or to send the drivers by e-mail.

Problems, problems... so what to do?. Well, a quick web search using the power of God ^R^R^R, I mean, Google, revealed something promising: there was only ONE web page listing drivers for a USB-to-IDE device using the now infamous ITE8903 chipset. As the pictures below show, it's the CP-2508, an external USB 2.0 hard disk enclosure -sporting a 2.5-inch notebook hard disk- from TSAIHONG, apparently a hardware manufacturer from Guangdong, mainland China).

Notice the chipset listed: iTE8903. That's the one used in the Simpledrive Mini. Good vives...

Click on download and... there's a Win98 driver listed!. Time to test my theory...

Now, I don't know about you but I sadly don't read chinese. So what it was time for some sleuthing.... what I did was blindly following the links until I found what was evidently -judging by the URL- a download page. And there it was, the Windows 98 driver for the USB 2.0 hard disk enclosure which uses an iTE8903 USB 2.0-to-IDE bridge chip. Time to test my theory!.

For the impatient, I'll cut the babbling: the driver works with the Simpledrive Mini and can be found by clicking on this download page. Choose the download icon next to "2508" -enclosure model#-. (Warning: likely a slow download).

Installing the TSAIHONG HD enclosure drivers

Plugging the Simpledrive Mini into the ancient Thinkpad 380ed running Win98SE and... Success!.
It IS the Chip, st#pid!, after all.

Having tested one of my theories once again, I now leave for the afternoon, to rest under the chipsets. (Hope this helps). µ