The USS-725 (uss725) is a real beast. Originally designed as USB Centronics adapter (uss720) this quite simple chip was brute-forced to drive ATA/ATAPI devices. A prominent example is the Archos MiniCD series of external USB CDROM drives.
The downside of using simple chips for complex tasks is that the silicon is cheap but the driver development becomes a complex task. And so it comes that the USS-725 Linux driver is anything from perfect. Nicolas Planel, who seems to be working for Mandrake Software, is the last maintainer of a USS-725 patch. The patch is included in the lastest Mandrake kernels but not simple to find as seperate patch:
The driver seems to be working for ATA disk drives but not for ATAPI CDROM drives - which I own :( When I have more time (Ha ha ha ;) I will try to somehow make this CDROM work... any hints welcome!
17th April 2005
Good news, it seems Igor Mokrushin picked up the work and imporved the driver.
See the link below.
More links: