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Sharmake Shuram photo
Switzerland, Bern
1 Level
690 Review
48 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ Upgrade Your PC's USB Speed with FebSmart 4 Channel 8 Ports PCI Express Superspeed USB 3.0 Card - FS-4C-U8S-Pro by Sharmake Shuram

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works well with Esxi and Server 12

FS-4C-U8S-Pro - New (2019), PCIe Gen 3, Low Profile, Well Designed (Large Heatsink), Quad Channel USB 3.0 Host Bus Adapter. . The low-profile design dictates horizontal port placement, which some reviewers found problematic when aligned with the case's slot openings. My experience with the Lian-Li server chassis shows that the port connector is tight but fully functional (try connecting the cables before tightening the locking screw). In addition to the 4 external ports, there are two 19-pin connectors for connecting 4 more ports (although they share bandwidth with the external ones). There's also a SATA power connector to add more power to the ports when connecting USB-powered drives or other power-hungry devices. The controller chip used is Renesas uPD720202, one per channel. My environment is an Intel 8700K processor running VMware Esxi 6.7 U3 Free as the host OS, with a Windows Server 2012R2 VM and some underutilized Windows 10 VMs. Performance is what I expected for spinning disks: 200/ 208Mbps for a single disk, 240/258 Mbit/s for Raid 5 measured with ATTO and no deterioration when using all 4 ports at the same time. The heatsink does a good job of keeping the chip operating at 95ยฐF in a well-ventilated case. I'm doing two types of daily backups on four USB 3.0 raid enclosures connected to a Server 12 Esxi VM (about 3-5TB each). Day). The motherboard's USB controllers were unreliable under heavy use, regularly dropping connections during backups. I tested 3 Quad Channel (PCIE x4) adapters and was looking for reliable USB 3.0 connections for my server. It was the only card I could work with. It works reasonably well with single USB devices assigned via VM settings, sometimes (accidentally) resetting the device, but works well with configured PCI device passthrough. To set up passthrough, I had to set the VMkernel.Boot.disableACSCheck switch to True. I've been battling this thing 24/7 for a week now and not a single device reset or failed backup.

Pros
  • Glitter
Cons
  • Upgradeable