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USB 3.0 card recommendations?

Ive had good results with two ESATA / USB 2.0 docks from thermaltake. My only issue Is the reliability of the cable to stay fully plugged in the back of the Mac Pro 100% of the time when there has been any movement in the device for the cable. Whenever I use my external dock, I frequently find myself checking the back of the Mac Pro before I turn everything on.

For accessing files from my archives of hard disks, it's been completely reliable and the speed was great. However, I'm tired of fiddling with less than sturdy connections of ESATA and I'm using USB 3.0 for my needs.

I picked up the rocket u 2port card off of eBay for $20. High point hasn't yet updated their drivers and while I got it to work using a patch from the hackintosh world, it doesn't yet properly handle the devices on sleep.
 
fuzzypickle said:
Are you able to pull the power from the second optical bay instead?
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We've got a second optical drive in there unfortunately. I bit the bullet and just got power from 4th hdd bay. Will try to turn the sata data half into an e-sata.
 
bluesteel said:
thats interesting that the generic card worked with LaCie's drivers....strange.

from what i've read, there are only two cards marketed for mac osx.....CalDigit and LaCie. i guess the CalDigit 2 Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed PCI Express Card for sale at OWC works with any drive enclosure.

i'm thinking about adding a USB 3.0 PCIe card too.
Click to expand...

There aren't many USB3 chipset makers out there. You'll likely find LaCie just use the NEC chip...
 
RT Wolf said:
We've got a second optical drive in there unfortunately. I bit the bullet and just got power from 4th hdd bay. Will try to turn the sata data half into an e-sata.
Click to expand...

Just get a simple power Y-adapter cable for your optical bay drive. Either use it to power both drives from one power cable, leaving the other one free for your USB card, or use the extra Y-power outlet to run an extension cable down to your USB card. These cables are cheap and available many places, including eBay.
 
I know this is an old topic but could anyone who's used one of these report on how these NEC chipset cards handle sleep? Between USB or eSATA the main deciding factor for me would be sleep since I normally don't shut down my Mac Pro. Thanks.
 
RT Wolf said:
In case anyone's curious, I ended up biting the bullet and using the harddrive bay closest to the back for power. The link I posted for 6-pin to molex wasn't the right one anyway and they don't seem to make the reverse of that anywehre I checked.
Click to expand...
What cable did you use for power? I can't find a male SATA to female molex cable anywhere.
 
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