Which PCI-E USB3 controller cards are supported?


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Picked up a Mediasonic HP1-U34F USB 3.0 card, but can't get it to do anything.  I am testing on an ASUS M3A78-T motherboard, and have tried it on two different motherboards, as well as different PCI-E slots.  Initial test was on UnRaid 5.0.6 with a Pro key, the latest test is on 6.0-RC3 with a trial license.

 

Was there something I need to do to enable the card?  Is there something I should look for in the SysLog to ensure the card is active?  Right now, the SysLog only shows entries with "USB 2.0".

 

In case it matters, I have connected the power plug, and the test device is a USB 3.0 SDHC card reader, with a 4GB card connected.  It should at least recognize the volume or controller, shouldn't it?

 

Thanks in advance...

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... Was there something I need to do to enable the card?  ...

I did not have to do anything, the card worked out of the box with both motherboards I tried Supermicro H8DME-2 and Supermicro  X7SBE,  unRAID Pro 6.0-beta2. I was connecting, however, external HDD USB 3.0 enclosures, not a card reader, of course in theory it should not matter, but we all know what theories worth...

 

If anything, I would thoroughly look thru the motherboard BIOS options.

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... Was there something I need to do to enable the card?  ...

I did not have to do anything, the card worked out of the box with both motherboards I tried Supermicro H8DME-2 and Supermicro  X7SBE,  unRAID Pro 6.0-beta2. I was connecting, however, external HDD USB 3.0 enclosures, not a card reader, of course in theory it should not matter, but we all know what theories worth...

 

Well, you were right on the money.  I connected a USB 3.0 external hard drive (2TB) and it recognized it immediately as an NTFS partition.  I was able to mount it, and write to it, no problem.

 

THEN, I connected a USB 3.0 external hard drive (4TB) and it only shows up in fdisk as a "GPT" partition, with no additional information:

 

  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sde1              1      266306  4294967292  ee  GPT

Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

No info on heads, cylinders, etc.  I don't seem to be able to mount it as the system doesn't recognize it as a regular hard drive?  Any idea how to get past this issue?

 

My goal was to use this as a removal backup drive, as opposed to a volume in the array.

 

Thanks again!

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...

THEN, I connected a USB 3.0 external hard drive (4TB) and it only shows up in fdisk as a "GPT" partition, with no additional information:

 

  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sde1              1      266306  4294967292  ee  GPT

Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

No info on heads, cylinders, etc.  I don't seem to be able to mount it as the system doesn't recognize it as a regular hard drive?  Any idea how to get past this issue?

 

My goal was to use this as a removal backup drive, as opposed to a volume in the array.

...

I was connecting 8TB Seagate Archive USB 3.0 externals, so this is definitely not the 2.2 TB size limit problem. However, I was only interested in preclearing the drives, so I did not even look if there was any recognizable file system. My only guess would be to check if your are using the latest NTFS driver, I believe it's called "ntfs-3g" and it's much smarter than the unRAID stock driver.

 

Edited: corrected "nfs"->"ntfs"

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  • 4 weeks later...

Got this one from Maplin yesterday: http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/usb-30-pci-e-adapter-n64ln - it's a Transcend card which can be found here: http://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-283

 

It has two power connections, one SATA and one Molex. I connected the SATA one and it works perfectly. unRAID 6 recognised the card and the attached drive (4TB) instantly without any problems.

 

Pre-clear speeds on my new external drive were 30MB/s on USB2 and are now >100MB/s on USB3.

 

Just wanted to let you know that this card is working fine in my setup and I'm so pleased I went for it over the slow onboard USB2 ports on my old mainboard.

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