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

[Alpine]

SD Mini USB 2.0 microdrive works in Win98

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.

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