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USB 2.0 card for win98 recommendations?

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hunterjwizzard

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The USB on my Tyan Trinity motherboard no longer works(actually both my ancient Tyan boards have the same problem...). I've sofar gotten around this by using a USB 1.1 two port card I had new old stock.

I would like to upgrade it to a 4 port USB 2.0 card, but I'd like to get a really good one with good win98 driver support.

Any recommendations?
 
Couldn't really go wrong with an Adaptec AUA-4000B with the NEC µPD720101 USB 2.0 host controller chip.
 
are the drivers for that going to be found waiting inside 98SE or will I need to supply them?
 
hunterjwizzard said:
are the drivers for that going to be found waiting inside 98SE or will I need to supply them?
Click to expand...

Microsoft never supplied USB 2.0 drivers for Windows 98 and Windows Me.

Microsoft didn't support USB 2.0 until Windows XP SP1, and then backported that support to Windows 2000 SP4.

For Windows 98 and Windows Me, you will need 3rd party USB 2.0 drivers, for example:

https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/_eol/usb_adapters/aua-4000/

Without downloading and taking a look at those particular drivers, I assume they most likely were supplied to Adaptec from NEC.
 
With that being the case I decided to hunt down a new-old-stock one. I've had... issues... before trying to find matching drivers for a card from my collection.

Fortunately a quick stride about eBay brought me the exact card you suggested, new in box with driver CD and support for win98 SE. Now I just gotta finish cleaning that desk up so I can start to actually USE that old machine a bit more :p
 
Tried Deoxit in the USB ports? Old clapped out USB ports tend to have problems having a reliable connection. Sometimes replacing the physical ports makes them work again.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Tried Deoxit in the USB ports? Old clapped out USB ports tend to have problems having a reliable connection. Sometimes replacing the physical ports makes them work again.
Click to expand...
I don't think the port itself is the problem, I get power out of them just fine. Its windows that seems to be having an issue recognizing the port. One of these days I'll dig up an old live CD and so how it functions under Linux.
 
Robbbert said:
Unfortunately, all the links produce "The requested URL was not found on this server."
Click to expand...

There is an ISO image of an Adaptec USB2connect driver installation CD available here:

https://archive.org/details/Adaptec-USB2connect

I have an original Adaptec USB2connect driver installation CD. I'll have to check to see if it is the same one available there.

Edit: Found some Adaptec USB2connect driver download links which still work:
https://download.adaptec.com/usb/usb2_win_drv_v31a.exe
https://download.adaptec.com/usb/usb2_win_drvm_v31a.exe
 
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I'll try shooting some CRC in there. I still can't get windows to read the drivers for the USB. I haven't messed with it in a while. The PCI 1.1 controller was good enough to handle the USB KVM.

I'm slowly learning that for things like USB and FireWire cards, NIBs can be had for a few dollars more than loose cards. I have 2 nib FireWire cards on the shelf, going to pick up a few more USB as time goes by.
 
Too bad Firewire never caught on in the PC market, it was so much better than USB 1.x. It was 33 times faster and used DMA, so it didn't burden the host CPU as much for data transfers.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Too bad Firewire never caught on in the PC market,
Click to expand...
What do you mean "ever caught on"? I've got stacks of firewire equipment, boxes of firewire cards. Most of my motherboards from the early-to-mid-2000s have onboard firewire ports. For a while every good Creative soundcard included firewire. There were even devices that let you boot to a firewire hard drive installed internally within a PC.

There was a good while in the early 2000s where flash memory was still too small for large files so firewire drives were the must-have hotness. USB 2.0 did eventually supplant it in the low-end consumer market but firewire stuck around in the enthusiast and pro-audio spaces. They're still making PCIe firewire cards.

It definitely "caught on". Just not in the cheap spaces.
 
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My new card arrived today. Took 20 minutes with scissors to get the blister pack open without hurting myself(much). This experiences has reminded me how bad packaging used to be.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
It definitely "caught on". Just not in the cheap spaces.
Click to expand...

I count "caught on" as in the thing in question was widely adopted and used by a large proportion of the general public. Just because a computer or a sound card has some specific port on it, doesn't mean that everyone is using it. Motherboards today still often have serial ports, but hardly anyone uses them anymore.

I too have a pile of Firewire cards from late 90s and early 2000s computers, and they were never used. They got specced as an option when the OEM built the machine, but the user never actually used the ports. I've found well over a hundred machines built that way from Dell and HP. I know the cards were never used from the amount of detritus in the ports, and the fact the drivers for the cards were not installed.

Outside the Apple ecosystem and media, nobody used Firewire. That's not "caught on".
 
cjs said:
So what did the majority of people connecting large external drives use instead?
Click to expand...
SCSI had a long run for those that needed large capacity external drives. USB 2.0 was introduced only about a year after Apple first shipped Firewire though Apple didn't ship with USB 2 until 2003. USB 2 was a common enough interface for hard drives. Little bit later, eSATA arrived for the serious hard drive enthusiast.

There were strange flash drives that coupled a Firewire or eSATA port with a USB port for power. Performance was great but the prices were extreme.
 
Firewire suffered from Apple tax. You could get the 1394 controllers for cheap, but the devices that use them were extraordinarily expensive.

I had an external drive sled 15 odd years ago with a Firewire port on it, it cost almost double what the USB 2.0 model cost. The transfer speeds and responsiveness of the drive connected to it was better, but not double the cost better.
 
USB was cheap, FireWire was good. As with any competing technologies those who wanted quality and speed got FireWire. SCSI was long gone from the removable storage scene by the time either technology became widely available.

There's also all the peripherals that took FireWire. If you had a DV video camera you needed FireWire to capture from it(probably why it made it on to so many OEMs).

So you might not have had a FireWire hard drive. But there were and still are tons of people using FireWire for tons of things.
 
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