It was time tonight to get USB High Speed working on my home office desktop box. I forget why it was time, it just was…
Oh yeah, I remember! There were three reasons:
You might reasonably wonder how USB HS could be broken on such an important box as my main home office machine. (By the way, I am being amused by typing "USB HS". Perhaps because of the shenanigans of the USB standards organization, which did not make High Speed mandatory for USB 2.0 compliant devices, most folks still seem to insist on saying "USB 2.0 High Speed". Apparently they are concerned that these devices not be confused with any bizarre USB 1.0 High Speed or futuristic USB 3.0 High Speed devices that might be floating around.)
Anyway, the reason it was broken is that at some point my wacky VIA motherboard and the Linux 2.6 kernel decided to disagree with one another on how the EHCI interface in the onboard USB chipset should communicate. I tend to blame Linux, as the result of the misfeature was a kernel thread crash. At any rate, this failure made the High Speed of my motherboard USB unusable.
I could have sought help and tried to track down the defect and fix it. Instead, I decided I'd just slap a $10 PCI card in, disable the internal USB, and be done with it. While I was at it, I'd take the CD/RW drive with the door that mostly needed to be opened with a paperclip out of the machine. I'd also take the 4x DVD/RW drive out of the machine, and replace it with an 8x Dual Layer (albeit dual +R only) burner that I'd bought a few months back on sale at Fry's (as with the PCI USB card). Fry's has DL media on sale for $1.50 a hit this weekend, so I can finally afford to play with DL burning a bit—although I really won't do much until I can get a platter of DL rewritable media so that experimentation gets reasonably priced.
For once in my life, a hardware upgrade on this highly twitchy box actually seems to have gone smoothly and achieved the desired result. I was able to do a USB HS upload to my audio player. Just now (after a couple of twitchy moments featuring defective media) I was able to burn an audio CD to the new drive.
While I was in the box, I noticed that the "tip magnetic drive bearingless" CPU fan I had installed is making an inordinate racket, although it seems to be moving enough air right now. I blew out the machine with canned air real good, especially the fan, and managed to coat the rest of the room in foul crud, but afterwards it was a bit quieter. I suspect I'll eventually have to replace the fan, though. Bleah—this operation is a pain. Avoid the TMD fans.