Cheap and very cheerful
Recently, I wanted to expand my Dell Latitude c840 laptop, adding USB2.0, a DVD re-writer and some more hard disk space. I popped down to MSquared and picked out what I needed. I opted for some rebranded generic products from Newlink, the NLUSB2-502 PCMCIA/Cardbus USB2.0 card, the NL-HD03 3.5" USB2.0/IEEE1394 hard disk enclosure and the NL-HD05 USB2.0 5.25" CD/DVD enclosure.
Now, on my laptop, I run Windows 2000, OpenBSD 4.0 and Ubuntu Edgy Linux. I also run Windows 2000 as a virtual machine, within Linux. After fitting a 160GB hard disk to the NL-HD03 (3.5" drive enclosure) and a DVD/+/-/RAM/Dual-layer drive to the NL-HD05, I was delighted to find that they all work flawlessly in Windows 2000, OpenBSD 4.0, Ubuntu Linux and the Linux/VMWare/Windows 2000 hybrid configurations.
Whilst almost every retail available piece of hardware works on Windows and much of it will work on Ubuntu Linux, it can be a nightmare trying to find hardware that will work on OpenBSD. The OpenBSD project tend to focus on the high price hardware usually used by businesses and don't normally develop support for the cheaper chipsets.
Before buying these products, I had never heard of Newlink, but I will certainly keep an eye out for their products in future. Okay, so these are generic chipsets, the PCMCIA USB2.0 card is an Acer Labs chipset, the CD/DVD caddy has an NEC USB-IDE bridge and the hard disk enclosure has a Prolific Technology Inc. ATAPI-6 bridge controller in it. However, Newlink seem to have chosen well on the chipsets used, as they play nicely with my setups and are also supported on Mac OSX. Only time will tell on the reliability front, but at the prices I paid, I won't expect them to go on for ever.
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Update: Three and a half years later and the drive enclosures are still going strong. The USB2.0 card died after about 5 months use and the replacement lasted about the same.
I've changed laptop a couple of times since then, so USB2.0 has been onboard for a while.