StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

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StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

Regular price: €83,00
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Description

Add two flushmount USB 3.0 ports to your ExpressCard-enabled laptop
Compatible with Dell Latitude E5530
2 Port Flush Mount 54mm ExpressCard USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP Support
ExpressCard USB 3 Controller / 5 Gbps USB 3.0 Expresscard / Expresscard Laptop Card
2Port USB 3.0 Adapter Card 54mm USB3 Card / EC USB 3.0 Card with UASP
2 Port Notebook USB 3.0 Express Card with optional built-in external DC power connector
Expand laptop expansion capabilities with additional USB ports

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Customer Reviews

It works. I am using this ExpressCard to add 2 USB ports to an older Thinkpad laptop built around 2011. Some of my built in USB ports on my Thinkpad are version 3.0 , but when trying to use an external hard drive for backup I needed another port for power to run the external drive. I thought this StarTech card would work, as I have bought the StarTech brand before and their products have been well made and work great. The problem I had was with the install, specifically getting the system (Core i7, windows 7) to recognize the card and then getting the drivers to load, stay loaded and load at the right time. Sounds complicated? It has been. I did need to download the correct driver install package from StarTech (that took time for me to locate it) as Windows 7 does not load the necessary drivers to get this card to work. Then I needed to figure out when to put the card in vs. the software. In fairness, StarTech didn't create this situation; although USB 3.0 showed up in 2008 (in theory) and Windows 7 showed up in 2009, and my Thinkpad was built in 2011, you'd think that you could just "throw" this ExpressCard into the machine and go. You'd think wrong. ExpressCard is older (2003), and you are dealing with not just separate hardware apart from the basic laptop, it's hardware that has its own standards. It took me time and research to get the card to eventually show up in "Device Manager" and work. That did happen. But after all of this, what didn't happen was getting enough power through the "new" USB ports of the ExpressCard. It seems ExpressCard tops out at 3.3v. My external hard drive requires 5.0v to run. So, does the StarTech card do what it says it will: Provide 2, USB 3.0 ports? Well, USB 3.0 is supposed to throughput up to 5.0gbs. Per Wikipedia: "ExpressCard's connection to the system bus over a PCI Express 1 lane and USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of 2.5 Gbit/s through PCI Express and 480 Mbit/s through USB 2.0 dedicated for each slot. So as I read it this does not equal USB 3.0 speeds. Did the StarTech card do what I needed? Not really, but it does give me 2, USB 2.0 equivalent ports. Would I do this again knowing what I know now? No, not unless I simply needed more USB ports of any speed and then I would probably buy by price. 4YAY! I finally have USB 3 on my ancient 2010 Qosmio laptop! It's still going strong, and I just added some more capability!! At last! I've had this amazing Qosmio laptop since 2010... that's right... SEVEN LONG YEARS! And it's still going strong. It's a great laptop. The only thing is, it never had USB 3 ports on it. I don't know why I never thought of it before, but it never occurred to me until just recently that I could get a PCMCIA USB 3 card! In fact, I totally forgot there was even a PCMCIA slot on this laptop! I mean, how often does anyone even think of PCMCIA anymore THESE days???The reason it became an issue in recent times is because I had a couple of situations where I needed to move multiple Terabytes of data from one drive to another. Well, USB 2 can do that at a rate of about a couple of Terabytes per DAY if you're REALLY LUCKY!!! Most likely, less than that! USB 3.x can get it done in hours. It will still take most of a day, but you can move 5 or 6 or 7 Terabytes in the same amount of time it takes you to move ONE Terabyte via USB 2.THAT is what convinced me I needed to find a way to get some USB 3 LOVE on this laptop. Lo and behold, I found the PCMCIA port that I had long since forgotten about.The only real issue I had with this card was caused by the spring inside the PCMCIA port being a bit too intense. This is the spring-loaded device that allows you to push in on the card to pop it out. When I push this card in, that button doesn't seat all the way and it causes a bit of outward force on the card which causes it to disengage, even though it looks like the card is still fully seated. I saw some other people complaining about the connection coming and going and I thought it was a bad driver or some other issue.I finally realized that the issue went away when I manually pressed in on the card! The connections solidly stayed and the drives remained online! So I took the card out and used a metal nail file to firmly press down the spring-loaded button inside the slot. I gently place the card back in and seated it, being careful not to push so hard that it activated the spring-loaded button.The function has been flawless since then!!! Boy was I glad I figured that out. I had a call in to the tech support at StarTech. I called them and gave them the thumbs-up because I didn't want them thinking there was still some kind of issue here.This is a great product, and I'm glad it still exists, even though it is of an age long gone!!!!!Thanks StarTech!!!!! 5Awesome and flawless Worked perfect, just installed in my Linux Mint laptop and it was immediately recognized, didn't even have to reboot. This is why Startech is better than others, it just works. Immediately did some benchmark testing, I know this isn't "real world" but it does give some kind of reference to judge things by, I am very impressed with the Startech card, being an ExpressCard/54 I knew it would be faster than USB 2.0, but I honestly didn't think it would perform as well as it did.HP Probook 6550b with Intel i5 m460 @ 2.53Ghz, 8GB RAM, and running Linux Mint 17.2 CinnamonUSB 2.0 with a 1TB Hitachi drive in a Vantec NexStar TX USB 3.0 SATA III caseAverage Read Speed: 33.6 MB/s (39.1 MB/s max)Average Write Speed: 22.8 MB/s (27.1 MB/s max)USB 3.0 with a 1TB Hitachi drive in a Vantec NexStar TX USB 3.0 SATA III caseAverage Read Speed: 84.9 MB/s (96.1 MB/s max)Average Write Speed: 56.7 MB/s (63.4 MB/s max)USB 2.0 with MicroCenter 64GB USB 3.0 Flash DriveAverage Read Speed: 34.2 MB/s (36.0 MB/s max)Average Write Speed: 11.2 MB/s (17.2 MB/s max)USB 3.0 with MicroCenter 64GB USB 3.0 Flash DriveAverage Read Speed: 86.1 MB/s (90.9 MB/s max)Average Write Speed: 11.3 MB/s (19.0 MB/s max)And just for reference, the internal 240GB OCZ ARC SSD driveAverage Read Speed: 266.3 MB/s (279.5 MB/s max)Average Write Speed: 228.4 MB/s (240.3 MB/s max) 5Marred by design and functional issues This is another update. Review is for the 54mm card in Dell Lattitude e6520's. These models are USB 2 only, plus 1 eSATA port. I was looking for an option to do high speed transfer with multiple external drives.For the first few hours I had nothing but problems. The transfer speeds were barely better than USB 2 and the card was too easy to physically eject from the slot.After emailing with tech support I decided to run the firmware update posted on the website again. Lo and behold after rebooting file transfer speeds quadrupled from 25 MB/s to 100MB/s.However, the card simply doesn't work as advertised with respect to 2.5" eSATA drives. It doesn't supply enough power to spin them up. One of my use cases is to backup drives pulled from laptops. These are top tier Seagate and WD drive. I used StarTech's own eSATA to USB adapter cable to connect these to the ExpressCard. There is a supplemental AC power cable you can use to supposedly boost the power the card supplies. Even with this clunky setup connecting the card to a wall outlet, and trying other non Star-Tech eSATA to USB cables, it still can't spin up any 2.5" drive.Then there still a risk of the card physically ejecting from the slot but this can be worked around. I ran several lengthy backups with two cables connected and had no issue with either drive or the card disconnecting.If your only need to use externally powered drives or other peripherals, this should be acceptable. If you're looking to connecting 2.5" drives look elsewhere. 2It works for what I needed It works on a Dell Precision M4600 with i7-2820QM processor, Windows 7 Pro. Getting the card to work was a bit of an adventure; I skipped the drivers from the mini disc as my laptop can not read those discs and I went to the official website instead. My "mistake" was that I didn't see the "warning" of not upgrading the firmware unless the device is not working properly so ... I installed the driver then upgraded the firmware. At that point, after the reboot, the computer wouldn't see any USB flash drives through this card. What worked for me was to uninstall the driver, eject the card, reboot then reinstall the card and finally the driver.One note: even though the instructions say this is a hot pluggable card, at least on Windows 7 Pro it is NOT (at least in the sense that you can take it out , put it back in and it works). If by any chance you take out the card from the slot while the laptop is on, the only way for Windows to see it again it would be to reboot. It seems that at least in my case there is some miss-match along the way between the BIOS (A08 from Dell), Windows and the card driver. Not worth for me to keep fiddling with it as it works for what I need, but I thought of sharing my experience maybe it can help others.Speed-wise, I could only test with a USB 2.0 drive and it does work very well (read / write around 65 MB/s according to CrystalDisk)I gave it only 4 stars because it does "click" when inserted properly but it does not "click" when removing and thus is not ejected automatically; this makes it tricky to pull it out (I used the flash drive to actually remove the card, as indeed it slides right out when pulling on the drive). When I compared the depth of the card to the plastic dummy slot protector from Dell, it seems this card is just a bit too short and maybe this is why is not ejected properly (when inserted, even the USB ports are tucked in well inside the frame of the laptop)All in all is a good purchase as it serves me for what I needed it and I don't think there is anything else out there better than this one but it does take some time to get it to work properly as well as extreme caution when ejecting various USB devices not to pull the card out too (in that case, in Windows, it needs a reboot to have it working again). 4Easy install now working, but instructions do not say which of the 4 driver folders to install, I intalled all 4 Installed into my laptop, the disk with the drivers came with 4 folders each with drivers, the instruction booklet did not mention this, so I opened each and executed the drivers in each, loading contents of all 4 folders. Once completed, inserted my patriot flash stick into the express card, nothing happened no popups, then inserted my external usb 3.0 hard drive, which has its own power source, and this worked, with this working, I again installed the patriot flash drive into the 2nd port on the express card, and now the patriot is working, so I removed the external hard drive only, leaving the flash, and it continued to work, then I removed the flash drive and re inserted and it continued to work, so, I have not idea what happened, I was thinking that I needed to use the USB to DC cable provided and buy an external power source to power the card, however, since it is working now, I'm happy, but I fear when I am traveling and do not have my external USB 3.0 hard drive, that just putting the Patriot flash stick in, may not work... On my Win7 laptop, no install wizard popped up, so had to install from each of 4 folders on the mini disk, windows search could not find a driver for the express card, so I did not have to cancel that part, per the instruction booklet. 55 Stars for Functionality, 3 Stars for the Price I needed USB 3.0 functionality in my Dell Optiplex 780 SFF system and the only PCIe slot was occupied by the video card, so this one did the trick. Installed the included low profile bracket then installed the card in the system and ran the executable to install the USB 3.0 drivers under Windows 7 64 and I was up and running in less than 5 minutes. To test the card I attached an external USB 3.0 drive and copied about 500GB worth of files ranging from 10MB to 3GB without any issues. This card is easily 3 times as fast as the onboard USB 2.0 connection, at times peaking at 80MB/second transfer rates.A few things to remember, though: The PCI bus is limited to 133MB/second data transfer rate, which means that you will not get the maximum 5gbps (640MB/ps) of USB 3.0 speed. This is the reason almost all USB 3.0 add on cards use the PCIe interface. That being said, this should still provide a substantiation improvement over USB 2.0 if your system doesn't have any open PCIe slots.Overall good product that does the job, but the price seems a bit too high considering most PCIe USB 3.0 cards cost less than half. 4A great way to add USB 3.0 ports to an aging laptop If your laptop is new enough to have native USB 3.0 ports, you may be better served getting a USB 3.0 Hub instead. However, if you're like me and have a laptop that's several years old and only has USB 2.0 ports, this card will allow you to use the faster USB 3.0 devices, but there are also several cons.ExpressCard slots are basically PCI 1x slots that you find in modern desktop PC's. Unfortunately the original (version1) ExpressCard slot's, found on 2010 and older laptops, only have 2.5 GB/sec bandwidth. USB 3.0 is rated for 5.0 GB/sec. So, right off the bat, you need to realize that your only going to get 1/2 the speed of a native USB 3.0 port. Another issue is power. USB 2.0 ports should provide up to 0.5 amps of power, but USB 3.0 ports should provide up to 0.9 amps. There is a little cable included with this card that's supposed to provide additional power to the USB 3.0 ports by plugging in to a USB 2.0 port. This didn't work for me, and I kept crashing my laptop when I plugged in a power hungry device like a portable hard drive. Funny thing is that same drive (technically a USB 2.0 device) works fine when plugged in to a USB 2.0 port. I had to use a powered hub in order to use them with this card. It's not all bad though. I could use a flash memory stick or (sometimes) a SSD hard drive without needing to use the hub.Another problem I encountered was finding the Windows driver for this card. The package does include a mini CD and the correct driver was on the disc, but it's a multi device CD that does not AutoPlay (paper instructions says it does), and the folder names on the CD are cryptic. I tried downloading updated drivers from the manufacturer's web site, and those didn't work either. I sent an e-mail to StarTech and they responded that new drivers would be released soon. Since "soon" could be anything from a few days to a few weeks, I wanted to either get this card working or return it to Amazon before the return window expired. I started digging in to the contents of the CD and examined every folder. I was looking for the hardware device ID string in one of the INF files. I finally found it, got the drivers installed, and the card is now working. The manufacturer has since released a new set of drivers on their web site. I've not tried them, so I don't know if they work or not. I'm still using the drivers I found on the CD (under the 72021_2 folder). I have swappable hard drives in my laptop and I can confirm these same drivers work with Windows XP and Windows 7 64-bit.I did a little more digging and apparently my card has a newer host controller chip. The drivers posted on the manufacturer's web site for this card are for the older host controller chip. If you get the updated version of this card like I did, you want to use the RENESAS-USB3-Host-Driver-30160-setup.exe to install the drivers.So after all of these problems and limitations, why am I still giving this card 4 stars? SPEED.Even though these ports work at half USB 3.0 speeds, they are still up to 5x faster than USB 2.0 ports. I also discovered that USB 2.0 devices were showing a 10 - 20% faster read AND write times during my tests. Devices designed for USB 3.0 are even faster. Maybe not as fast as they could be with native USB 3.0 ports, but definitely faster than USB 2.0 ports.Final Note: Wikipedia shows that ExpressCard specifications also include pins for USB ports (from your motherboard chipset). On an older laptop this would be USB 2.0 ports. If you have native USB 3.0 ports on your laptop, then these should be USB 3.0 ports. I've seen some extremely cheap USB 3.0 ExpressCards. I don't know for sure, but these cheap cards could be just exposing those existing USB ports, and that's why they are so cheap. Since I had so many problems finding the correct drivers for this card's host controller, I know it's the real deal. 4Solid and nice results First Review: 1 starInstallation was easy. The USB 3.0 Expresscard worked immediately and didn't have any problem when connected to USB 3.0 external hard diver. Its the right fit for expresscard. Its a little bit hard to be reomved but that makes it not pulling out when unplugging the USB cable (Image is included on the product description). However. The transfer speed was exactly as it is in USB 2.0. I thought it could be a power issue, so I connected the power adapter that came with the item but nothing changed. Transfer rate is between 12MB to 30MB/sec which is equivalent what I get from USB 2.0.. Tried everything possible nut nothing worked. My laptop is Thinkpad X201 with Expresscard 2.0 which support much higher speeds.Second Review: 5 starNow I came to update my review. I gave the product 5 stars.I updated the driver from 2.1.28.0 to 2.1.32.0 (not available from the company. Found it in a forum) and flashed the new firmware 3.0.28 while the original firmware was 3.0.25 (Also not available from the vendor). Now I am getting higher speeds.I downloaded HD Tune Pro which tests the speed of any USB drive. I connected my USB3 HDD to an USB 2.0 and ran test drive. The result I got are as follow : Read 31MB / Write 26MB with a maximum speed of writing to 50MB. Transfer time for 665MB almost 1.5 minutes. Then I connected the HDD to the USB 3.0, ran test drive and got the following result: Read 110MB/ Write 55MB with a maximum speed of writing up to 110MB. Transfer time: 0.5 minute.I uploaded four images (find the images within the product images up in the left corner of the product description page). an image showing that it fits right to the expresscard. Another one for the update for the driver and firmware. Third image for the read/write speed and the time to transfer over USB 2.0. And finally, the read/write speed and the time to transfer over USB 3.0.Not the speed expected from USB 3.0 but this is due to the limitation of the expresscard while I do have ExpressCard 2.0I blame the company for not including the updates for the driver and firmware in their website. I am not sure if I am allowed to post links for the updates here or not. reply to this post if you need the links.Good luck**UPDATE March 6th, 2013I added the links to the firmware and new driver at the end of the posts. Here is the link for my new post:http://www.amazon.com/review/R2PLB72KM0UXC3/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&asin=B00535CMEE&cdForum=Fx321LV4W8CNCCZ&cdMsgID=Mx301LBYXEUCZV3&cdMsgNo=10&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx35VHC5N1MR7D2&store=electronics#Mx301LBYXEUCZV3 54 GHz Pentium 4 is fine for routine word processing and web surfing Bought this card hoping to extend the usability of my obsolete but trusty old Dell Inspiron 4600 that has faithfully served our family since 2003. It's a 32-bit system that has a quirk that prevents upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. With some inexpensive upgrades, the 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 is fine for routine word processing and web surfing. I hoped that this PCI card would speed up throughput of data from my advanced USB WiFi adapter and an external hard drive. The card installed fine and showed up as "enabled" on my Device Manager's list, but it would not recognize anything that I tried to connect to it. I spent way too much time searching out drivers, uninstalling and reinstalling them, rebooting countless times and using many choice expletives. PCI systems have an internal "bus" speed limit, so the modest, maybe 30% increased USB 3.0 connection speed is just not worth it in my case. Hope you have better luck. 2

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StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

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StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

Categories

Headsets

Computers

Laptops

Mobile menu

StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

Description

Shipping and Returns

Customer Reviews

StarTech.com 2 Port Flush Mount ExpressCard 54mm SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter with UASP - Dual Port Laptop ExpressCard USB 3 Controller (ECUSB3S254F)

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