Intro and an EMI issue?:

    A gentleman by the name of Andrew emailed me during the long, cough, review phase of this unit. Below is his experience with EMI interference with the NXP-205. Andrew was nice enough write a condensed version.

    Also, I want to make this very clear, that Andrew's issue with EMI interference, is the only known case. I could not reproduce this, and I have not heard of anyone else having this issue. Even though one person has officially experienced this problem, Vantec created a solution for the units, and is installed on during manufacturing now.

Andrew:

     "Apparently, as nutty as it sounds, turning down the speed of my two intake 80mm case fans using my NXP-205 Vantec Fan Controller caused my floppy drive to fail. I will defend this conjecture below.

     I installed a Vantec Silver Nexus NXP-205 Rheobus (with 4 fan controllers) in my Kingwin K11 case. This case comes with 4 80mm fans: two intake fans located front and bottom beneath the 3.5" bays and two exhaust fans elsewhere. They are controlled by the first two and last two fan controllers on the Vantec unit respectively. The NXP-205 is located in the 3.5" bay immediately beneath the floppy drive.

     In order to reduce noise I set the speed of the intake fans, via the unit's first two fan controllers, to their minimum setting. Over a period of about a few weeks I noticed that my floppy drive was having I/O failures. I tested the floppies in other machines and they worked. At this point I thought that perhaps the floppy drive or cable was bad. However, swapping the floppy cable and drive indicated that both of them were in fact OK.

     At some point out of happenstance I tried the original setup but with the floppy drive not yet back in its bay. This worked! So, I put the floppy drive back into its bay but then it didn't work! At this point I started to suspect the fan controller being that it was located directly beneath the floppy drive. I then turned up all the intake fan controllers to their maximum setting. Now the floppy drive worked again!

     I played around with the fan controller setting the individual controllers at different levels and confirmed that when I turned down the first two controllers less then 2/3 the floppy drive would fail. The other controllers didn't seem to have any effect.

     I exchanged the unit for another one but it had the same problem. Fortunately, I was able to solve the problem by creating a shield
for the unit out of cardboard (cut from a software product box), folded aluminum foil, and scotch tape (I taped it to the top of the unit right above the electronics). The floppy drive seems to work fine now."
 

Vantec's official public response:

     "Sometime during September 2003, an end user contacted us with concerns that our NXP-205 3.5" Fan Controller was causing his floppies to become corrupt. As with all concerns brought up by end users, we investigated the problem. Our tech support crew attempted to duplicate Andrew's setup but were not able to duplicate the error initially. We also went ahead and contacted our overseas offices to have them run tests as well. They informed us that, out of 100 cases, they were only able to have it happen once. In that once case, the inductors were directly below the read/write heads of the floppy drive. Based on that information, we tried duplicating the test using a dozen units, making sure to place the inductors directly below the read/write heads. We managed to have the problem occur with just one unit.

     Although it seems like the problem occurs very rarely, we still acknowledged that it is indeed an issue. Our immediate response to Andrew was that he could move the NXP-205 to above the floppy drive, shield the unit himself, or have us RMA it for him as that was the best we could do at the time. However, we did not write this off as a one time occurrence. The mere fact that we were able to reproduce the error a few times was enough to warrant a solution. In November 2003, we began including aluminum shields with the NXP-205.

     To date, Andrew has been the only person to have brought up this issue with us. While it may be possible for others to have experienced the problem as well, it was not made known to us. We do listen to the concerns of our customers and do what we can to address any issues."

The End:

    Sound off in our forum here, if you wish. I can't explain my strange occurrence with the controllers here. It must have been something with the power here in the summer. I don't know. I don't have an answer. I admit, it does make me look silly. Ok, emitting something that rhymes with plumb bass, but I guess this is just how this one will have to stand.

Pre-Launch Update:

    I just mounted the silver (second unit) NXP-205 in one of my test PC's. Once again, there is no LED fan flickering, and my floppy, placed above the NXP-205 works fine too. But I never had an EMI issue with it, so... I guess it was just something strange happening at the house here. In no way am I insinuating that the NXP-205 is a bad product, nor am I insinuating that Vantec would knowingly sell a bad product. Once again, you have to give Vantec credit taking action for ONE person. That makes me proud to be able to work with Vantec. They listen! So I would recommend you pick one of the NXP-205's up if you need one. I wasn't sure before, but now I am. Thanks for coming by! Until Next Time.

03-22-04 Update:

    Below is a copy of two emails I got from a reader. I also asked him what kind of floppy drive he had.

     "David...Thanks for your article on the Vantec controller. I linked to it from the MODTHEBOX site. Like the Andrew in the article my floppy drive was giving me fits. I contacted KC Computers thinking I had a bad drive and did the swapping out thing with the cable and drive, but reading your article found me an answer. I contacted Vantec...they sent out a shield...the drive has stopped acting up. Thanks...Andy"

     "David...the drive is a Mitsumi D359M3B. Like I said, originally I thought the problem was the drive itself, or the cable, but both worked fine when I mounted them in my other computers. I also had another Mitsumi drive which I mounted in the affected system and it showed no ill effects. I had a mystery on my hands until I linked to your article. I thought Vantec was top notch with this. They did the testing, devised a solution, and implemented it across the product line in a timely fashion. It's refreshing to see a company that backs up their products. Also, good work on your part in reporting a little more than just another product review of the NXP-205. Thanks...Andy"

    Yup, Andy #2. This still seems to be a very isolated issue, or just one who’s first name is Andy or Andrew. So if you are having problems with the first generation NXP-205's, you have finally found your answer!