P-7805 and USB 3.0 Expresscard

Hi all, Long time but still running strong on my P-7805!

Just bought an external USB 3.0 hard drive and getting tired of the USB 2.0 speed on my laptop. Have bought a generic cheapo 54mm USB 3.0 Expresscard to add more longevity to my laptop which still runs like day one. One question I have and I think I already know the answer too but wanted to make sure. Do the FX laptops only support Expresscard 1.0 speeds, i.e 2.5 Gbps? The chipset says yes to me, but it's still an improvement over USB 2.0.

Also, any other issues with these USB 3.0 Expresscards I should know about (for the people that already use them)? I already found out I might need to upgrade the firmware of the card due to power/sleep/wake from boot issues.

 

Yes it is 2.5 Gbps. I have not had any issues other than watch the device. Some use cheap cables that will cause issues. You will find that almost no SATA II HDD will over saturate the bus limit, Higher end SSD's may.

 

Thanks TANWare, I'm not planning on using any generic cables, I only have one that came with the Hard Drive, it has a funny micro/mini USB 3 connector to it.

 

Even the ones supplied can be of issue. I have a Nexstar 2 HDD dock that is USB 3.0 but the included cable kept on dropping it back to 2.0 and disconnecting the drive while doing so. I had to purchase a new high quality cable to get it to work properly and be stable.

 

Thanks for the tip, I will keep my eye on it. It is a Seagate drive, so I would have thought that their cables were of reasonable quality.

 

Omexis, did that generic cheapo 54mm USB 3.0 Expresscard come with drivers and where did you purchase it?

 

It arrived yesterday from amazon, I read the reviews on there about it before, some people had problems installing it with the mini-cd that came with it, and that the drivers on there were just a jumbled mess or old ones.

Reading one review explained to download the latest NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 drivers from Station-Drivers. I installed those before plugging in the card and it works perfectly. HD performance using HD Tune was 125MB/sec on average for my Seagate 5TB External Hard drive compared to 30MB/sec for USB 2.0. Transfering files though is slower than that. I tested it yesterday between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 and it took half the time to transfer files over (File size permitting) using USB 3.0, so i might need to investigate if there is a bottleneck with the card/driver/hard drive etc.

This is the card I bought. GMYLE® Express Card Expresscard 54mm slot to USB 3.0 x 2 Port Adapter up to 5Gbps Compatible USB 1.1 / 2.0 Windows XP/Vista/7

 

Maybe our mother boards are just too old to handle higher speeds for USB 3. But you are getting double transfer speeds for file transfers. That would help in transferring videos and photos from a card to the computer. But you would need to get a USB 3 card reader. Maybe I will just wait another year or so and get a new laptop. This laptop is still running great for now.

 

Actually I think I solved the problem. While my external hard drive is fast, my laptop 500GB drive is slower at 5400RPM and average of 48MB/sec read, my other laptop 1000GB is 71.3MB/sec read average. Just did the same transfer test for a 5.16GB file on my 1000GB drive to the external drive and USB 3.0 was 1 minute 20 seconds (60-80MB/sec transfer average), USB 2.0 was 4 minutes 30 seconds. So now I know why! Slow laptop drives!

Yesterday my 500GB drive was transferring the same file on USB 3.0 in 2 minutes 20 seconds, on USB 2.0 it was 3 minutes 58 seconds (bear in mind that my 1000GB drive is practically full and I imagine that the test file was heavily fragmented).

So if you're an SSD user in your laptop, you will see a lot of gains. I'm happy with the performance boost considering.

 

True, this becomes the issue with enhancing one port without consideration of the other devices. The original HDD could have 100MBs on the outside platter but be limited to 50MBs on the inside platters or less. As mentioned on the SATA II interface for a 2.5 drive you need a SSD to take advantage of the USB 3.0 express card.

So the good is that you have a speed enhancement and it allows you to max out your current hardware.

 

Very true TANWare, I didn't even consider my laptop hard drive speeds before I purchased the USB 3.0 Expresscard. Stupidly I expected blazing transfer speeds until I realized, but I am still happy for just over £10 in my money or $20 in yours.

 

Where you will really appreciate the difference is where there are 2 USB 3.0 devices and you need to transfer between them. When you have 2 usb 2.0 they have to share the limited bandwidth. While they will share the 3.0 bandwidth too it is much faster. Not as fast as true 3.0 but still much faster than 2.0.

 

Oh great, now I need two USB 3.0 external hard drives maybe in the future...