Review on StarTech Com 4 Port PCIe Card Type by Dan Bobbert

It's 2021 and I've finally found/bought a working USB PCI-E card! It seems that all USB 3 PCI-E cards on the market today are manufactured with significant defects or high fault tolerance. Recently my cheaper and cheaper Mailiya PCI-E USB PCI-E 2016/2017 hub card failed or required a manual firmware update after every OS boot. (Mailiya is the Japanese version of Innatek's USB-3 PCI-E board, and recent testing of Innatek's board showed it to be buggy.) Of course, this StarTech board costs a lot of money, especially these days at $156, but finally something - then it just works. And as a bonus, the board is supported with Linux. Packed well in an easy-open cardboard container, once wrapped in an anti-static bag, then in a bubble bag, all easy to open. At first glance, the board is a bit flimsy; but as long as it works, who can I complain to? Using Void Linux, I am posting some preliminary tests here. Note: The tests should be consistent compared to my only stability/reliability tests. (My main tests or usage are with mirroring operations on external hard drives that take days/nights to complete each task. And I probably won't know the true performance for a few months.) After some short tests with rsync ( rsync -axv - -info=progress2), USB port speed also seems to be much more stable compared to cheap/smaller PCI-E hub type USB cards. On Linux with "mount -o sync" a 2.7 GB file at 29-30 MB/s and on Windows 10 a 234 MB file at 31-32 MB/s. Different file sizes and number of files affect the USB transfer speed. These speeds were tested using an optional powered USB 3 hub connected to a StarTech PCI-E card with a Samsung 64MB 3.1 USB flash drive. If someone asked me if I would buy this product again, I would say yes! YUP ! Definitely!" . Basically a play on words. Just give me a plain USB PCI-E card that just works, not another broken piece of junk wasting shipping resources.