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CalDigit USB3 PCI Cards

S

scottrichardson

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 10, 2007
718
297
Ulladulla, NSW Australia
Hi all,

I recently installed a 2 Port CalDigit USB3 PCIe Card into my 2009 Mac Pro.

Shortly after I noted that my Mac Pro started having issues, namely:

1. It wouldn't boot all the way up on some attempts, and instead would get stuck in a loop of a grey screen with spinning loader graphic.

2. I also found that my 3TB Seagate External USB3 Hard Drive would stop working with Time Machine, due to an 'error'.

3. If I were to 'hot-plug' my external drive, my Mac Pro would shut down.

4. Finally, my Pro would also randomly reboot/shutdown, especially overnight when it was supposed to be sleeping.

Today I removed the card and now my mac boots fine, and also Time Machine works fine with the drive connected via my front USB2 port.

Has anyone here had any negative experiences with their CalDigit cards? Has anyone got any tips that may help me overcome my problems as I would ideally like to keep using this USB3 card for faster speeds - but I cannot handle having my Mac Pro not booting up, or shutting down randomly.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

My current machine specs
'09 Mac Pro
8-Core 2.93GHz Dual XEON
32GB OWC RAM
240GB OWC 3G SSD
2 x 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (RAID 0)
Radeon 4870 512MB GPU
OS X 10.8.2

Best regards,

Scott
 
Last edited:
I can only report that my Caldigit FASTA-6GU3 card has been perfect from day one. That's the 2-port USB 3.0 / 2-port eSATA card.
 
It's certainly worth trying, and I'd say if it wasn't seated properly, it's entirely possible. Pull it and reseat it.
 
Hey again.

So, I took the card out and voila, no more problems.

So I put the card back in, this time in a different slot. Problems came back.

I think the card is corrupting my entire PCI subsystem, because Photoshop wouldn't even work properly when this PCI card was installed.

Photoshop would tell me there was a display driver error with my Radeon 4870. As soon as I took out the Caldigit card, Photoshop returned to working just fine.

Very frustrating. I have now removed the card and am running time machine on an external drive with it connected to my only spare USB ports - the ones at the front of my Mac Pro, albeit at USB 2.0 speeds.
 
power header?

i've got a problem with the 2-port card as well; there's a 4-pin power header on it (it looks like it is the same connector that supplies power to floppies)

how on earth does one hook that up to a macpro power supply?

you can't use the spare optical drive power cable; even if you get the right adapter, there seems to be no way to route it down to the motherboard in a modern macpro.

Any ideas?
 
adww12321 said:
thanks for this!

just curious, how did you remove the molex connector? do you just give each pin a tug? (never done it before -- don't want to destroy the thing :) )
Click to expand...

The metal male connectors have two 1-way flaps on them each. I used a tiny flathead screwdriver to push the flaps in. Pull the wires out. There should be almost no resistance; if there is, you didn't get the 1-way flaps out of the way.

Run wires through the case. Pry the flaps back out. Push male connectors back into plastic connector.
 
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