AKE express 54 esata and USB3 adapter review

Well, I bought the chinese ebay AKE express 54 card adapter that offers one USB3 and one esata connector. It is found on ebay and elsewhere for $12 to $18. Most sellers are in china, so it takes a few weeks to arrive. However I've bought a ton of stuff direct from chinese sellers and delivery is reliable. It comes with drivers on a minidisc which are win7 64 compliant.

My setup:

Dell XPS M1330 13" laptop with 2.5G dual core intel, 4G ram, HDMI (cost me $2K almost 5 yrs ago lol)
win 7 64 bit professional sp1
rosewell external hard drive case with usb3 and esata, 2tb wd green drive inside, powered from rosewell AC adapter
AKE express 54 card adapter installed in the Dell with one esata and one usb3 connector

This card is 100% internal and flush, so nothing sticks out of the slot at all. An esata or usb3 cord plugs into it, your choice. I have no clue if it will drive both at one time. It also comes with an external dc power cord to supply power from a spare usb port to the card, but you don't need to use it if you're simply connecting to an AC powered external hard drive to perform backups from esata or usb3. I believe the dc power cord is only needed if you're driving a hub, external drive powered from usb (no power supply) or some other power hog situation I'm not familiar with.

My Dell required the drivers to be installed form the disc that came with the AKE card. Trying to get the card working with windows generic drivers is not gonna happen & the card comes with no written instructions. The card sat DOA in my pc for weeks until I got around to loading the mfr-provided drivers. I pointed the device manager to the AKE drivers folder and it picked the appropriate ones and installed them automatically. A non-geek idiot can handle it, not a problem at all. fyi, the hardware drivers on the disc are popular and found on the internet, but you won't find them searching under AKE lol.

Results: The card is incredible, considering the cost. I ran a speed test which involved moving a 50G folder from my external drive to my laptop c drive. I repeated this test 3 times (same laptop, same external drive, same 50G folder of test files). Well, it turns out the usb2 motherboard connectors on my Dell laptop are exactly half as fast as the usb3 and esata connectors on this express 54 adapter card. This result was repeatable and within a couple percent. Figure doubling your speed and halving the time it takes to make backups. The esata and usb3 connectors are a dead heat tie wrt speed (sorry, you esata or usb3 fanboys lol). To give you an idea what speeds we're talking, my usb2 connectors hover around 28mb/s which comes to 30 minutes to transfer a 50G drive file while the usb3 and esata on this card offers 56mb/s which comes to 15 minutes. I wouldn't laugh or sneer compared to advertized max speeds because this is reality, not some useless lab test. usb2 performance is well documented by users.

summary: I gotta say this card works far better than I expected. Double the speed and esata compatibility is a nice feature.

The only hassle I encountered was getting the driver files moved to my laptop. The darn minidiscs scary for a slot load dvd unit, so I used a desktop to dub the minidisc onto a standard 5" dvd. at that point, the drivers installed easily.

I'd buy another one of these cards if I had another laptop with no esata and an express 54 card slot. Some folks might complain about only 2x improvement over usb2, but I'm just grateful I have the flexibility to use any sort of cable. Why spend 4 hrs doing a backup thru usb2 when you can cut that to 2 hrs with this card?? I hated changing cables on my shared backup drive every time I need to switch from my Dell E6400 with esata to this Dell xps m1330 with usb only.

any questions??

 

Can someone please link / PM the link to me from where they got it for 12 $? or so?

 

The USB3/e-sata card is using your expresscard slot's pci-e 1.1 2.5Gbps interface.

The reason you are only seeing doubling of performance over your USB 2.0 port is because your HDDs can't transmit data faster. If you attached a current SATA-II SSD that can fully saturate the bus when doing block transfer then it would be 250MB/s versus ~30MB/s, so 8.3 times faster. $12 that would be well worth it for the time and utility bill savings during backups.

 

Nothing you said makes sense to me....

I'm not complaining about the 2x speed improvement. I find it humorous that you would assume that a $12 card will exploit 100% of the theoretical speed capability of the express card slot. That is a naive assumption that will lead to wasted money on hardware. An SSD will allow programs to run faster, but it won't help file transfer speeds with this card, period. Even more significantly, my backup drive is a 2TB Western Digital Hard Disc Drive (HDD) and it surely ain't gonna to write any faster than my laptop can read lol. A HDD connected to an SSD will not transfer files at SSD speed! This card simply extends the liife of laptops that were manufactured prior to esata or those that are too basic to have that feature. Who in their right mind is going to put a 250gb ssd into one of those anyway? That's like adapting antilock brakes to a model T and expecting it to stop like a Porsche. You really think it costs a lot to run a backup for an hour per month? I doubt if it comes to 2 cents per year for electric and I'm over it.

The 30mb/s speed you quoted is for my old USB2.0, not the AKE card's USB3 or esata interface. Based upon my testing, the HDD hard drive is absolutely NOT the speed barrier. My Dell E6400 has the same technology hard drive with integral esata and it runs at 120mb/s instead of the 60mb/s I'm getting out of this express card in a Dell XPS M1330. Same file transfer test and same backup drive, by the way. This is a valid test. Why, I ask you?? How can a HDD run twice as fast as as other one when they are virtual clones?? This tells me the AKE express card interface adapter is the limiting barrier, not the HDD!!! The HDD in this machine with the AKE card must be running at 50% of it's max speed (or less), by definition. Ain't noway this adapter card will miraculously outgun my Dell E6400 latitude transfer speed by installing a faster HDD when it's showing bottleneck speed issues with the same darn hard drive specs.

This laptop is worth about $200 with it's sata HDD, so I'm not going to spend 150% of full value to change it's drive techology.

This SSD recommendation reminds me of a kid down the street who installs a set of brand new $1500 wheels on a $500 car...especially when stuff like the shocks and ball joints needed replaced and the car won't pass inspection in 6 months lol.

 

Please follow my instructions above because ebay links expire every 7 days. Go to ebay and type the following 4 key words into the search box: AKE USB esata express

...easy, right?

 

Thanks. Did that and found the eSata ones. Which/ where would be the 12 $ one with both eSATA & USB3?

 

Why can't you search? How does $10.17 delivered sound??

express 54 esata 3.0 | eBay

 

I bought mine on Amazon.ca and it cost $16. Shipped in a week. I made another post on the card here.

 

Thank you. Honestly, when I did search all I found was ones without the Combo and I do not know why.. Wierd how few keywords change things.

 

....guess my original key word suggestion wasn't so ideal. Hopefully you get your card quick...they are really nice to have.

 

I finally received the card as I was out of the US and a friend brought it over. The CD that cake with it is not readable - Can someone please share the DRIVER package?

For Win 7 x64 (ASAP!!) , XP 32, OSX, Linux ??

 

I finally received the card as I was out of the US and a friend brought it over. The CD that cake with it is not readable - Can someone please share the DRIVER package?

For Win 7 x64 (ASAP!!) , XP 32, OSX, Linux ??

 

I use the AKE 54mm expresscard 2xUSB3.0 controller together with SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 64GB flash drive, I get transfers up to 150MB/s.

 

I have the same card and there is no way to find working drivers, i would apreciate a lot if someone sent it for me.

[email protected]

 

For ASMedia ASM104x chipset. the latest driver is v1.16.10.0:
ASMEDIA

 

Hi guys.

Do you know whether this card supports PortMultiplication? Can I ran 2drives RAID enclosure though it?

Do you know what chipset does it use?

 

It doesn't support port multiplication, but this one does:
eSATA ExpressCard - 2 Port | Flush-Mount Slim Design | StarTech.com

AKE card uses ASMedia ASM-1042 and ASM-1061.

 

Does anyone know a combination USB3 + Esata card that does support Port Multiplication (occasionally referred to as Port Multiplier) on the esata port? I've got 1 ExpressCard port, a usb3 hub with a mix of drives connected and wish to add at least one esata port (but better still if I can do more)...

 

Nice! I bought one of these a few days ago and it should be delivered soon.