Inateck PCI-E to USB3.0 Two-Port Expansion Card Review & Installation

Current list of Inateck PCI-E to USB cards available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2MM1xrr

The physical installation of this card was a piece of cake. Inateck included parts in the box to accommodate several different system configurations. For providing power directly to the card instead of letting it draw through the motherboard, there is a SATA power splitter along with a 4-pin Molex to SATA y-adapter harness, which allows you to connect to both old and current generation power supplies. A standard mounting bracket comes pre-installed on the card, but a short bracket is also included in the box for small form factor cases. The card also has a 20-pin USB 3.0 header on its rear for connecting other USB expansion ports to it (such as a front panel device).

Being a PCI-E 1x card, you can install this into any available PCI-E slot in your system regardless of size, from 1x to 16x. Installing the card into a larger slot won't provide any additional speed, but it will still work just fine.

Speaking of speed, I performed both synthetic and real-world benchmarks using this card. My test system was a Dell XPS9100 tower, i7-930 processor, and using a Western Digital My Passport 500GB USB 3.0 portal hard drive that was already 96% full for transfers.

Using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3a, I obtained the following speeds:

Dell USB2.0 Sequential Read, 1000MB: 33.94 MB/s
Dell USB2.0 Sequential Write, 1000MB: 26.41 MB/s
Dell USB2.0 Random Read, 512KB: 20.25 MB/s
Dell USB2.0 Random Write, 512KB: 12.87 MB/s

Inateck USB3.0 Sequential Read, 1000MB: 49.34 MB/s
Inateck USB3.0 Sequential Write, 1000MB: 48.75 MB/s
Inateck USB3.0 Random Read, 512KB: 25.05 MB/s
Inateck USB3.0 Random Write, 512KB: 12.88 MB/s

The synthetic benchmarks show an increase in speed using the Inateck USB3.0 expansion card, especially for sequential reads and writes, but it's not as large of a margin as I was expecting. Of course, synthetic benchmarks are just that; they don't necessarily indicate real-world performance. And as they say, that's why we run the races. For a more realistic test, I transferred some 10GB and 15GB files back and forth to the drive. The below figures are from each test after the transfer speeds leveled out. For the write tests going from the Desktop to the Portable Drive, I've also listed the initial speeds from the first few seconds of the transfer in parentheses after the leveled out speeds.

Dell USB2.0 10GB file, Read: 31.9 MB/s
Inateck USB3.0 10GB file, Read: 86.4 MB/s

Dell USB2.0 15GB file, Write: 42.7 MB/s (initial speed: 86.4 MB/s)
Inateck USB3.0 15GB file, Write: 73.3 MB/s (initial speed: 170 MB/s)

As you can see, there is a much greater difference between the USB3.0 and USB2.0 speeds in the real world file transfer tests. The Inateck USB3.0 expansion card has been a breath of fresh air for moving large files between my portable drive and my desktop computer. More and more external hard drives on the market these days are using USB3.0, so making the small investment to upgrade your computer with USB3.0 connections will help you make the most of your hard drive purchase by enabling it to use the maximum transfer speeds possible.

My only minor issue with this package at all was with the instructions - specifically, the support page link. A driver disc is included in the package, but I always recommend visiting a manufacturer's website to get the most up-to-date drivers for your system when installing new hardware. In the instructions, it tells you to visit a website to obtain the current drivers, but the website address has a typo in it ("dirvers" instead of "drivers"), and the link given is also for the German version of the website. I instead went to Inateck's .com website, which I found much easier to navigate. I also found newer versions of the drivers listed there than on their German page.

I used the drivers on the included disc during my initial installation of this card, but I had problems with my USB drive disconnecting and reconnecting during my tests. Uninstalling those drivers and installing the newest drivers from the website (listed in the comments section of this review) solved my problem. At the time of this review, the newest Windows 7 driver is Version 3.5.106.0.

All in all, I was very impressed with the performance increase I saw after installing this card and using it with my USB3.0 portable hard drive. Inateck's package is well thought out and easy to install; I would highly recommend this card to anyone looking to upgrade their computer with USB3.0 support.