It's about quality not speed

I've been investigating several chipsets, the following companies produce good quality chipsets; Texas Instruments (TUSB6250 USB), NEC (D720133GB), Cypress (CY7C68300-56PVC) and Philips (ISP1581). In the mean time I ordered several second hand, high quality enclosures. One of those was an older type LaCie DVD burner. I opened it up to see what the PCB was made of. It turned out to contain the NEC (now Renesas) D720133GB, which is no longer in production. The PCB implementation proved to be straightforward, and looking at the NEC D720133GB datasheet and performance, we clearly have a winner here. I investigated if the chipset is still for sale, it turns out it is! Once I found a reference NEC USB/IDE implementation (LaCie clearly did a one on one copy!) I knew I was on the right track, no need to reverse engineer anything in that aspect. Since then I've been sourcing all the components, filling in the dimensions and putting a schematic together (like LaCie a one on one copy of the NEC implementation). Here is a partial screenshot of what I've been designing myself:

Although there is a small custom LaCie firmware that's stored on an EEPROM (24Cxx type). Next step will be to try to dump that using a tiny EEPROM USB burner that I've ordered, leading to no loss of quality in that aspect either. Stay tuned.