This card adds teriffic USB3 speeds to a computer with one caveat. If you try to operate more than one USB 3 device at a time, it will slow down significantly. If you have a USB 2 device plugged in, the entire card slows down to USB 2 speeds. If you want to run multiple USB 3 devices without any slowdown, you will need a controller card that has a separate controller chip for each channel and a PCI-E 4 or 16 port interface. An example is the RocketU Quad USB 3.0 Card. It is about 4-5 times more expensive as this card.

Installation went well on a Hewlett-Packard Windows 7 64-bit computer. I did have a bit of a scare when seating the card into the PCI-E slot. When the card seated, there was a snap sound. I think it was the silver metal of the card clanging against the body of the computer box. Not exactly a sound I want to hear but nothing broke and everything is working. Read on.

The package contained:
1) Anker Uspeed USB 3.0 PCI-E Express Card with 4 USB ports (with 5V 4-pin power connector)
2) 5V 4-pin power connector to SATA power connector adapter cable
3) USB 3.0 PCI-E Card Driver on mini-CD
4) 2 screws (I didn’t need them)
5) Instruction Manual
Installation steps are easy and are provided on the box as well as in the included Instruction Manual (which is more of a small four-page leaflet).

This is what I did:
1. I first connected the provided SATA to 4-pin adapter power cable to the Anker USB 3.0 card.
2. With computer off and unplugged, I installed the Anker USB 3.0 card into the available PCI-Express slot and connected the power cable to an available SATA power connection in the computer. The available 5V- 4pin power connector in my computer was too short to reach the Anker USB 3.0 card but the provided SATA to 5V 4-pin cable adapter acted like an extension cord allowing me to connect the card. This was really helpful and I’m glad the adapter cable was included.
3. Turned on the computer. The computer recognized the new hardware and attempted to install a driver but driver installation was unsuccessful.
4. I put the mini-CD in the DVD drive and opened the disc to reveal one file: VIA_XHCI_Driver_V4.00B_NoAp.exe. I double clicked on the file and it installed the VIA XHCI Host Controller Driver v4.00B successfully
5. Rebooted the computer to finish the installation.

Note: The Instruction Manual states “Each USB port can only provide a 0.9A max. power current. For high-power devices, such as hard disks, please connect these to an additional power source to ensure sufficient power supply.”
After reading this I was disappointed because I wanted to use a USB-only-powered portable USB 3.0 drive I have and not mess with an AC power cord. I decided to try it thinking what’s the worst that could happen? A system crash wouldn’t be the end of the world and I already imaged my System before installing the card. I’m happy to report everything worked well when using a USB-only-powered external hard drive.

After the installation was complete I decided to see if I spent my money well. Here are some comparisons between the USB 2.0 port and my computer and using a USB 3.0 port in the newly installed Anker USB 3.0 card. I used the same ports on the computer for each data transfer and I used the same file for consistency. I listed each of the external hard drives I tried and put the time it took to transfer a large file below.

Western Digital Elements External Desktop 2 TB 3.5” USB 2.0 AC-powered hard drive –
USB 2.0 port: Time to transfer large file from Desktop to Drive was 3 minutes 5 seconds

HGST Touro 2 TB 3.5” External Desktop USB 3.0 AC-powered hard drive -
USB 2.0 port:
Desktop to Drive: 2 minute 56 seconds
Drive to Desktop: 2 minute 18 seconds
Anker USB 3.0 card port:
Desktop to Drive: 1 minute 45 seconds
Drive to Desktop: 1 minute 2 seconds

Western Digital Elements SE Portable 1 TB 2.5” USB 3.0 USB-powered hard drive -
USB 2.0 port:
Desktop to Drive: 2 minute 48 seconds
Drive to Desktop: 2 minute 18 seconds
Anker USB 3.0 card port:
Desktop to Drive: 1 minute 12 seconds
Drive to Desktop: 1 minute 2 seconds

I expected to see an improvement in data transfer time and I was not disappointed. The USB 3.0 connection greatly outperformed the USB 2.0 connection. I had no trouble with the USB-powered-only hard drive despite the notice in the Instruction Manual and the transfer time between the AC-powered and USB-powered external hard drives were similar. Interestingly, the Western Digital Elements SE portable drive significantly outperformed the HGST drive when transferring data from the Desktop to the Drive.

If I have problems in the future I will post an update.

I wanted to add USB 3 to an older desktop, and picked this card based on all of the positive reviews. I mean, with an average above 4 stars over more than 1,700 reviews, this couldn't be bad, right? Well, physical installation was fine, and yes, I plugged in the power connector. (I've been successfully building systems since the last millennium, so I feel confident saying I know my way around a PC.) The driver package then gave me a hard time (on Win7). It basically refused to install the drivers because it said there was no matching hardware installed. Huh. That should have been my first clue. I manually extracted the files from the executable, which was just a self-extracting/running zipfile. (Why do we have drivers packaged as tens-of-megabyte bloated adware for companies that doesn't even work when you only need a few kilobytes of actual stuff? Sigh.) I was able to install those manually, and eventually after rebooting was able to get it to work.

All was then well, with my USB 3 external hard drives connected and I was able to copy data back and forth. I didn't pay too much attention to the speed because I figured I'd be limited by the spinning disks anyway.

But mysterious troubles started. My system, which had been rock-solid before, had random lock-ups. The first one or two I'd just chalk up to utter randomness, but they seemed to happen about ten or twenty minutes after I powered on my computer every time. It took me a few days to figure out that it seemed I could trigger them when I was reading or writing to a disk over this card's USB 3 connection. Huh.

What's weirder was that this card would sometimes not be present in windows. What I mean by that is that it would just not be there in device manager. It didn't matter if anything was plugged into it or not. It just seemed to be a 50/50 chance every time I rebooted whether it would show up or not. Obviously, I was pretty ticked off when I wanted to plug in a hard drive to use, and found this card wasn't available, and that I'd have to reboot and see if it came back.

Needless to say, I was increasingly frustrated with the time I was spending debugging the random system freezing and this card disappearing. I didn't think it was the card causing any of this, and thought it must be something else, so I spend several days searching the web and trying various suggestions. I finally decided I'd had enough with the card playing its disappearing trick, so if it wasn't reliable, I might as well take it out, because it was probably going to end up being returned. I never had any more random freezes once I took the card out, which pretty much settled that.

I finally came across some random webpage that I'll never find again where someone else was having difficulty with the same USB 3 chipset used on this card. He had done some real digging into the chipset's documentation and figured out that it wasn't fully compliant with the PCIe spec. The deficiencies were supposedly minor, and dealt with how this card worked in the company of other cards on the bus, but clearly they were causing problems for him, me, and a large number of other people I had found complaining on the web. Apparently, the VIA chipset in this card was notoriously bad in linux for a long time, although it's unclear to me if the linux driver handles it better now.

So, the bottom line is that this card is to be avoided. It may work for you, for some amount of time, but the reality is that there's a non-trivial chance it'll just decide to not work someday. That's not the fault of the manufacturer, it's the fault of using a USB 3 chipset that doesn't play nice on the PCIe bus.

I really didn't think that in this day and age we'd still have to dive in and figure out the components on devices like these, but apparently we do. The recommended USB 3 chipset to use is the Renesas/NEC µPD720200 family (the other numbers are µPD720201 and µPD720202). If you're searching for USB 3 adapter cards on Amazon, you can actually search for those numbers, as some cards advertise it as a selling feature. If you've spent time banging your head against the wall with other USB 3 chipsets like me, you'll understand why. I replaced this card with one using that chipset, and have had zero problems since.

So, I hope this helps someone else, who might be thinking, like I was, that all of these people saying "works for me!" on Amazon couldn't be wrong. Well, it seems they didn't use the card long enough, or are lucky enough to not have other PCIe devices that cause this one to choke, or they're too lazy to come back and change their reviews when things really go wrong.

I read the instructions on the box: I installed the card and plugged in the very-tight Molex power connector, and then installed the driver from the CD. The USB 3.0 transfer rate was good (Passmark measured 119 MB/s sustained write speed to an external HD). But after a few minutes, my Windows 7 system would freeze, requiring a hold-the-power-button forced shutdown. I Googled to find the latest driver on the ianker website, and installed that. Still the same issue. I used System Restore to bring me back to before this installation, and my computer is stable once again. I am returning the card via Amazon's RMA process.