Hello,

I currently have the NEC 3500A with 2.18SE installed on my Laptop with USB enclosure (Bytecc ME320). I have flashed my drive all the available FW and I am still getting transfer speed of 13.98 at max. Is this the limitation of the USB 2.0 enclosure? Did anybody to performace test on any of the enclosures?

I asked this in some of the last threads, but is there any issues of using the binflash windows version for flashing NE3500A inside the USB enclosures? It seems it's working fine for me but I thought there might be some potential complications in doing this. Thanks everyone!

Also I am getting really crappy rip speed when using the DVD shrink. Someone mentioned that the encoding speed highly depend on my CPU. Do you think Pentium M 1.4Gh is limiting my compression speed?

Yes. Compression speeds depend on the amount of compression and the bitrate of the source material, as well as the quality settings used. It is almost entirely driven by your CPU.

13.98 what? 13.98x speed? This is pretty good for USB2.

You think 13.98x speed is good? I thought otherwise, since USB 2.0 are supposed to be transfering up to 480mb/sec. If you think this is good enough, then I will take your word for it, hehe. THanks!

Many people are lucky to get 8x from USB2. The rated speed is for burst speed, which is not a sustained transfer rate such as is needed for burning. Firewire usually works at 16x because of it's superior throughput.

Hi !
I also use a NEC 3500A into an external USB 2.0 enclosure from conceptronic (the enclosure recently broke down (driver for Cypress AT2LP RC42 not found message) and had to be fixed by reprograming the EEPROM, but that's another story.
Anyway, I can only write DVD's at 8x or lower on a Pentium III 700Mhz Laptop (with an USB 2.0 PCMCIA card). I'm quite content with this speed as I don't write so many DVD's anyway and I believe using a lower speed increase the chance to be able to read that DVD after several years.

I have one of those, an ME320U2, and on my current notebook I can almost hit 15X read. It benchmarks @ 19MB/s burst.
I have no problems with 16X with this enclosure: http://www.dealsonic.com/plpmblidetof.html on USB. The 1394 drops out on me, but the USB benchmarks @ 23MB/s and 1394 @ 26MB/s (when it's there) burst.

But... my notebook specs are: 3.2 P4 HT, 800 MHz FSB, 7200 RPM HDD W/ 8-MB cache, 1-GB RAM.
I could not come close to that transfer rate with my other notebook, maybe 11-1/2X, which was the same spec except 2.4 P4, 400 MHz FSB.
Personally, I think that the increased performance is in the faster Bus speed.
I know that I can compress video with Shrink more than twice as fast with the new notebook.

Cheers,
Blaine