I stumbled upon this card after I could not get the cheaper and SATA6- equipped Asus U3S6 to work. Unlike the Asus, this Buffalo is tiny, fits into a PCIEx1 - slot, and runs completely cool despite the fact that it requires extra power from a floppy- type connector. An included Y- cable lets you siphon off a SATA power connector instead.
The driver from the CD installs a NEC USB3 hub - I don't mind the rebranding, as NEC means more to me than Buffalo - and it all works just like it should, plug & play, even under the elderly Win XP. Buffalo Technology DriveStation SuperSpeed USB 3.0 PCI Express 2-Port Interface Card IFC-PCIE2U3
I installed this USB 3.0 card on my Win7 64 system and it works flawlessly together with the Buffalo USB 3.0 drive station. Average file copy speed is 94 Mb/sec with a 12 ft. cable, this is awesome to say at least.
I recommend Buffalo's USB 3.0 PCI-E card over the Asus U3S6 Asus U3S6 True USB 3.0 & True SATA 6Gb/s Support Motherboard, at least for Dell desktops. I purchased the Asus U3S6 and it was only slightly better than USB 2.0, peaking around 24 MB/s. I have an older system, a Dell XPS 420, so it isn't going to be as fast as the best out there. However, the Buffalo card is peaking around 75 MB/s (I posted a pic above), 3x faster than the Asus card. I think I read that the Buffalo driver utilizes RAM to increase read/write speed, but I doubt that fully explains the 3x increase over the Asus card. I think that the Asus just doesn't play nice with my older system.
Another reason to avoid the Asus U3S6 is that it has a bad driver that crashes many systems/motherboards. There is a review that mentions this on the Asus U3S6 Amazon page. I wrote a review myself to warn others, but Amazon didn't/wouldn't post it. When I first loaded the drivers for the Asus card, it froze my system. I had no other choice but to do a forced-reboot. Then neither of my SATA drives were recognized by the system. The crash was caused by the AHCI driver for the e-SATA port on the Asus card. If you have a Dell, and you insist on getting the Asus USB 3.0 card, beward of the AHCI driver. I was able to do a System Restore, which got rid of the AHCI driver. After the recovery, I only loaded the Asus USB 3.0 driver. This went much better. However, as I mentioned above, the performance of the Asus card was only slightly better than my USB 2.0 ports, peaking at 24MB/s. The USB 3.0 drive was the same for both. They were both tested within a week of each other.
This card is a great performer at a great price. I posted a photo (in the item photos) of my speed test results with this card. The card has operated flawlessly so far. Installing the card (and included drivers) was pretty straight forward.
My setup includes:
Asus P5Q-E motherboard
Card in a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot (x16 unnecessary, but all I have open)
Card is driving an Iomega eGo USB 3.0 external HDD
Connected with a USB 3.0 cable
Results:
-Average Read Transfer Rate: 101.3 MB/s
-Burst Transfer Rate: 173.4 MB/s
-Real World: It took 1hr to copy 150GB of (fragmented) data from my internal HDD
(I expect that this was limited mostly by my internal HDD)
For comparison, I ran two similar tests: one using a USB 2.0 cable in the USB 3.0 port; and another using a USB 3.0 cable but in a USB 2.0 port. The results of both were much worse:
-Average Read Transfer Rate: 38.2 MB/s
-Burst Transfer Rate: 38.7 MB/s
Conclusion: While I haven't seen any product out there that actually comes close to the 'theoretical' speed of USB 3.0, this card is still performing 2.6+ times faster than USB 2.0 in my system.
(Just make sure you use a USB 3.0 cable!)
Short and sweet
Drivers loaded correctly and show up in device manager with no conflicts.
USB 2.0 devices are recognized by the Buffalo USB IFC-PCIE2U3 3.0 port when plugged into it.
USB 3.0 devices however are not recognized by the Buffalo USB IFC-PCIE2U3 3.0 port.
Buffalo Tech support baffled...might be defective? Might be drivers?
Note: The latest drivers available for this card from the Buffalo Technology website are dated Dec 18 2009.
It may work fine on your computer.
For me..I had to return it.
Note: My system is running Windows 7 x64...i7-2600 (Sandy Bridge)
I recently purchased a 1 TB Seagate Freeagent Goflex hard drive with a USB 3 adaptor base. I have a recently purchased Gateway SX2850-01 running 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I copied a 9+ GB video file to it using a USB 2 port and it took 7 minutes 4 secs. I then purchased this Buffalo Technology USB 3.0 adaptor card. During HW installation the power connector had me worried for a moment because I hadn't seen this type of connector before. I had to unplug the power connector from the DVD player and insert the new power adaptor since there were no spare power connections in my computer but it wasn't difficult. Then I powered up and installed the driver. I deleted the file previously copied and then copied it over again using the new USB 3.0 adaptor and the copy time was 1 minute and 36 seconds. I repeated the test on the other USB 3.0 port on the Buffalo card with the same timing results and then repeated it from a USB 2 port also with the same time of 7+ minutes. Everything worked as expected and I'm going to appreciate the ~4X speed advantage.'
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