USB -> IDE adapter (Cypress SL11R?)

[forbjok]

I'm considering buying an USB-IDE adapter.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this one:
http://www.gwctech.com/ebproductdetail.asp?id=21
From what I saw in the windowns driver's .inf file (which I downloaded from the site above), it seems to use some Cypress chipset called "SL11R".

http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=491
People on the above site seem to have gotten various other devices with the same chipset to work (using just the usb-storage module?), but most of them seem to be with older 2.4.x kernels - only one mention of 2.6.x, and it doesn't say which version.

Anyone have any good/bad experience with USB-IDE devices using this chipset on recent 2.6 kernels?
Any other similar ones I consider looking for instead?
Any particulars I should avoid at all cost? Don't need a paperweight
Any advice is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[forbjok]

Just thought I'd post back, in case anyone else is interested.

I got one of these today, and it seems to work fine. I tried it with two 3.5" IDE harddrives and an Asus DVD-ROM. I repartitioned one of the HDDs with cfdisk, formatted it with reiserfs, copied a FreeBSD ISO onto it, turned it off and on again, recalculated the MD5 sum of the ISO, and checked it. The sums matched. The other drive wasn't mine, and had an NTFS partition on it - i tried mounting it, and it seemed to have no problem reading it. I also tried playing a DVD on the DVD-ROM, and it worked fine except I had to temporarily change the /dev/dvd symlink to /dev/sr0 (the DVD-ROM on IDE-to-USB adapter).

I haven't tried it on a CD/DVD burner yet, but I almost certainly will.

Btw. I'm running kernel 2.6.9, w/ gcc 3.4.2 and NPTL-enabled glibc.

[teilo]

With few exceptions, IDE-USB adapters will work flawlessly under Linux as a USB Mass Storage device, provided you have the requisite drivers compiled in - namely, generic scsi, and USB mass storage.

The interesting test, however, is the new Generic USB-only driver in the 2.6.9 and later kernels. Many have complained (and rightfully so) about the poor performance of USB2.0 drivers on Linux, versus Windows. It is hoped that the new low-level USB driver will help correct this deficiency, although time will tell, since the new USB driver is very new and likely buggy.
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Teilo who is called Teilo