NorthQ NQ-14001 IDE & S-ATA External USB2.0 Case

Does anyone have any knowledge of the NorthQ NQ-14001 5.25" external USB enclosure?

It looks very interesting as it will accept either IDE or S-ATA drives and has an internal power supply. But I cannot find any information on which USB controller chip(s) it uses. Neither NorthQ's web site, the Danish instruction manual I downloaded or the only review I could find give any details. I also tried contacting NorthQ a couple of months ago but I did not receive a reply.

http://www.northq.com/products/usb/nq14001.html

Review (Danish): http://www.tweak.dk/review/NorthQ_NQ...k_boks/604/1/1
Review (Google translation): http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Looks very similar to the following AC Ryan product except the eSATA connection:

http://www.acryan.com/index.php?opti...d=12&Itemid=78

Welland also make products with a pretty much identical design except they don't have rounded edges on both sides:

http://www.welland.com.tw/html/enclosure/340j.html

Thanks for the links Mankmeister.

Internally the Welland 340J looks very similar to the NorthQ. According to this thread the Welland probably uses a SunplusIt SATALink SPIF225A chip. As this Welland only supports S-ATA drives I suspect the NorthQ & AC Ryan may have a second bridge chip (either IDE to USB or IDE to S-ATA).

Still no luck on the NorthQ, I have had a couple of replies from Raidsonic and Novatech regarding their IDE only enclosures.

Raidsonic say that their Icy Box IB-550U uses a Cypress chip.

Novatech's own brand NOV-525ENC enclosure also uses a Cypress chip. I sent a sales enquiry via their web site and sales manager at one of their branches went to the trouble of ordering one, opening it up and e-mailing me the numbers from the chip. (Thank you)

Novatech 5.25" External Drive IDE Enclosure USB (NOV-525ENC)
1) CY7C68300B-56VXC
2) B04PHI0619
3) CYP629991

Was doing some googling, and found this interesting if old link:

http://2xod.com/articles/USB_Enclosure_Benchmarks/

A very interesting find. Thank you Negritude.

I have discovered that the NorthQ NQ-14001 uses a Jmicron JM20337 chip.

Looking around it seems that it should be capable of 16x burns and ~28MB/s burst speed.

Any thoughts?

After much searching I could find no alternative so I went ahead and bought the NorthQ enclosure. But there were a few problems and it was returned.

1) The internal width was only 145mm. A standard desktop optical drive has a specified width of 146mm. My Samsung DVD writers are 145.7mm wide and would not fit. My narrowest drives (Benq & Lite-On CD writers) are 145.2mm wide and only just fitted.

2) I tried connecting a Samsung SATA DVD writer there were problems getting Windows XP to recognise it. And when the drive was recognised it failed to recognise any discs. This was the only SATA drive I had, but I had the same problems with 3 different computers (all running Windows XP).

3) Finally I tried 3-4 different PATA CD & DVD writers (set as Master). Windows had no trouble recognising the enclosure & drive, and when I inserted a disc it was recognised. But when I tried to copy files off a disc it would stop part way and show an error message. The same happened when running the CD-DVD Speed disc read benchmark.

I have to assume that the PATA drive problems were due to a fault with my enclosure, but I cannot be certain about the SATA problems. Although both the manufacturer & vendor web sites stated that the enclosure was for SATA & PATA optical drives, the writing on the box (in Danish) appeared to say that it was for PATA HDDs & optical drives and SATA HDDs. So it may not actually support SATA optical drives (although the Jmicron JM20337 has been reported to work with optical drives).

But it was nice to have an internal PSU and the fan was fairly quiet.