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Hong Kong, Albuquerque
1 Level
667 Review
62 Karma

Review on πŸ’» Ableconn PU31-AC-2 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C and Type-A PCIe x4 Host Adapter Card with ASMedia ASM3142 Chipset by Isaiah Edgar

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works in Mac Pro 2010

This is my first recap of "Day One"; I might update it after a few months of use. I bought this card despite cheaper but functionally equivalent alternatives because it was known to be compatible with macOS. In my case it worked right away without installing drivers or any other issues. Installation wasn't trivial, but that's Apple's fault, no issues with this card. The Mac Pro Mid 2010 (5.1) does not have easily accessible SATA connectors or cables extending from the motherboard, but this card does require SATA power. So I had to reach into part of the optical drive case and pull the combo SATA data/power connector off one of them; Perform SATA data expansion from half data back to ODD; Use a SATA Power Y splitter and plug half of it back into the ODD, then feed the other half into the main body of the case and use the SATA Power Extender to get to my new USB 3 card.es is a little Ruby Goldberg. Assembled the computer, plugged the ordered USB-C hub/dock into the card's C port, and connected an external USB 3 enclosure with 5 drives to the card's USB-A port. Booted up the machine, switched to the desktop immediately with no lag and every device shows up exactly as it should (so only 6 drives that used to be on USB 2.0 are now on USB 3 A/C). My outdated but fairly powerful 12-core Mac with 64MB of RAM just got new life, especially now that I'm booting from an SSD and have a base game and other monster apps loading lots of data onto another SSD. It was a hassle to use USB 2 for external storage (e.g. a few minutes to copy a movie). Much faster. I'm not expecting a theoretical maximum of 10 Gbps, but I expect more than 5. I'll try to set up a controlled benchmarking of random and sequential reads and writes under different circumstances (from/to my boot SSD, from/to an internal HDD at 7200 rpm, to/from another external hard drive connected to the same card, etc.). You can test some features of the application, e.g. B. the restart speed of a suspended virtual machine. And I should get another SSD and see how it performs with this mediated card.

Pros
  • Everything is great!
Cons
  • infuriates