Inateck PCI-e to USB 3.0 (4 Ports) PCI Express Card and 15-Pin Power Connector, Red

I purchased the Inateck 4-Port USB 3.0 PCIe card for my Mac Pro. Yes, for a Mac. Nothing on the product description indicated that it would work on a Mac but I had seen a YouTube video using the Inateck card on a Mac Pro and figured it was the same and would work. The Inateck card was cheaper than some of the other options (which had more reviews) and what convinced me to get the Inateck was the fact that it CAME WITH CABLES. No need to purchase additional cables since they're provided in the box. Unlike the YouTube video, Inateck listened to the reviewers comments and provided 2 separate, short cables, that don't have all the clunky extra connectors on them. (For the record, you don't actually NEED to connect this card to a Power Source in the computer ... technically it needs it to be able to provide power the specified power to the USB device, however, most USB devices that you're connecting this to will have their OWN power source (like a Powered Hub or a Powered External USB hard-drive). So for those of you nervous about connecting the card to a power source, don't worry. Installation in the Mac Pro was a breeze. I had an open SATA hard-drive bay inside my Mac Pro and an open PCIe port. Inateck included 2 cables with the USB card ... a SATA to 4-pin Molex connector (the "old school" connectors that go to a power supply ... or to a DVD bay) and SATA "Y-cable" (SATA to SATA). For the Mac Pro I used the Y-cable. Note that you will need to connect this SATA cable to an open SATA port on the motherboard. The Mac Pro has 4 easy to install Hard-Drive bays. Normally you'd slide a hard-drive into the bay and it would mate with the SATA connector but for this installation you'll need to use one of these open SATA ports. I plugged the Inateck card into an open SATA port in my 4th hard-drive bay. Note that the SATA connector for a hard-drive is basically broken into 2 sections: POWER and DATA. The only part of the connector you need here is the 15-pin POWER section. Inateck provided a cable with the POWER section. *However*, you need to know that the cable provided by Inateck will NOT fit properly out of the package. You need to modify the cable slightly. I was a bit apprehensive to do this at first but once I did it, I laughed at how simple it is. The Y cable with SATA on all ends will need to be modified. Take the end of it that has only 1 connector, this is the side that goes onto the motherboard (either one of the "Y" ends will plug into the Inateck card). The connector has a plastic nub on either end, so it would fit in a normal SATA Power connector, however you'll have to cut one of these ends off to fit on the Mac Pro. You're not cutting the connector, its pins, or its wires, you're simple cutting off the plastic nub so the connector will fit onto the Mac Pro's motherboard. First, make note of which orientation the connector must mate. You'll see that one side of the connector meets the edge of the connector in your computer. The other end would normally have the DATA section of the cable but the Inateck cable doesn't have the data section and instead it has a square end of plastic. You need to cut this part of plastic off so that the SATA cable will mate on the motherboard of the Mac Pro. I used a pair of scissors and a file to get the plastic end cut off. Once you've done this simple modification you can use the cable for installation. To install in the Mac Pro: 1) Unplug the computer and touch something metal to ground yourself. 2) Unlock the case and take off the side door. 3) Lay the computer down. 4) There are 2 spring-loaded finger screws covering the available PCIe slots. Remove the 2 screws and take off the lock holding down the open PCIe cards. 5) Insert the Inateck USB card into an available PCIe slot (I used slot 3, for example). Make sure it's nice and snug in the PCIe slot NOTE 1: The Inateck card doesn't use the entire length of the PCIe connector. Don't worry, it still fits. NOTE 2: For some reason the 4th PCIe slot on the Mac Pro won't work. The computer will recognize the card but no power will be provided to your devices. This is a known issue and I found multiple references online to this. DON'T plug the card into the 4th PCIe slot. 6) Take one end of the SATA "Y-Connector", the side that has the "Y" with 2 of the same connector, and plug one of those into the Inateck card. 7) Take the other end of the SATA connector, the side that you cut the plastic off, and connect it to an available SATA POWER port in your Mac Pro (available hard-drive bay). 8) Put the PCIe cover back up using the spring-loaded finger screws. 9) Close up your computer 10) Power on and Enjoy. I ran a speed test using a Seagate 3 TB drive I picked up at Costco and was very impressed with the speeds. The "Disk Speed Test" I ran (by Blackmagicdesign) clocked read and write speeds in the 150-170mb/sec range (averaged around 160mb/sec). Pretty impressive! Glad it works on the mac, even if it's not advertised to. I did NOT need any drivers to make this work on the Mac. I'm using Mac OS X 10.9.1 (Mavericks) and the drivers are built into the computer. USB 3.0 drivers are included in Mac OS X 10.8.2+.

I think this was a fantastic price for an extremely useful item. I needed USB ports for my desktop because I have several peripherals connected including printer, scanner, game pad, keyboard and mouse receiver and external hard drives. This card was easy to install following the provided step by step instructions. The drivers installed easily and the 4 USB ports perform perfectly. I am not concerned that much with speed so I can't comment on that. I did have an issue with my Carbonite backup programs right after installing the Inateck card and I immediately assumed it was related. I sent an email to Inateck and their support immediately replied and suggested that I contact Carbonite but if problem was not resolved Intaeck would certainly replace the card. It turned out to be a Carbonite issue but before I even had a chance to get back to Inateck support they had emailed me again asking if my problem was resolved yet and assuring me that the card was guaranteed for a year. I think Inateck deserved the 5 stars I have given for a great product and timely and responsible tech support.

After reading in other reviews that this works well with older Mac Pros, I purchased one to install in my 2008 Mac Pro. Installing the KT4001 in my computer was difficult because I had to take out my fan unit and run some molex extension cables from the DVD drive in order to provide power to this card. In hindsight, I wish I purchased the KT4004 model which doesn't require power. I didn't know about the KT4004 at the time of purchase. If you're getting one of these for an older Mac Pro, you might want to take my advice and just get the KT4004 instead! Despite the installation difficulties, it worked great immediately after boot up. There was no need for any driver installation. I should add, I'm using an older operating system, Mountain Lion, due to having old software which requires it. I was happy to find out that this card works even with the old OS. After a week of use, my computer stopped recognizing the card. I contacted Inateck support who had me do some troubleshooting and determined that the card was at fault. Their support team was very understanding and shipped me a new card free of charge and didn't require that I ship the broken card back to them. The replacement has been working fine for a few days now. If there is any trouble with it I will be sure to update my review. For now, it's working great and this was a quick and easy way to add USB 3.0 to my older computer. I'm enjoying the fast speed for doing backups and transferring large files.

About a year ago I bought (from Amazon) and installed the Inateck KT4005 USB 3.0 upgrade PCI-e card. That is the green card that doesn't require a power connection but works directly from the mobo power. It worked OK but it was an onerous task to crawl down behind the computer to plug in a thumb drive each time. So I bought and plugged in a 3.0 hub. It was an improvement over crawling on the floor, but became unreliable as far as thumb drives being recognized by the computer. Two San Disk CZ43 ultra-fit drives couldn't be recognized at all. I think that was the fault of the drive, not the card and I wrote my review of that product here on Amazon. Nevertheless, there were lots of problems with getting enough power to the hub to make every drive work reliably. I spent days on a tech support forum hashing over power requirements for thumb drives and trying to figure how to make the hub reliable. Some days were good, some bad. Finally, after everything seemed to go dead, I complained to Inateck and received some top-notch support. They offered to replace the upgrade card for me, but after some discussion, it was decided that I should get their KTU3FR-4P USB 3.0 card (red one) with a direct connection to the computer's psu. We both came to the same conclusion that there was nothing wrong with their green card, but my power requirements were just a little too much for it to handle in powering a hub at some distance from the computer. I've now installed the power-connected card and it's working like a champ. Even the single remaining balky SanDisk drive springs to life in the hub (I gave the other away to a friend, along with a warning). I can't say enough about Inateck's support in this matter which was really caused by my not getting a powered card from the get-go. The green card will work fine for some configurations but mine just wasn't one of them. Thank you,

I backed up a Norton backup from my secondary 1TB internal hard drive onto an external Seagate GoFlex 3TB hard drive. It took 11 hours and 38 minutes. That is a loooonnnngggg time. My backup HDD was almost full and that was with only two backup file/folders, so I decided to store the older file that I had started in 2011, that included pictures and music and took up a lot of memory. I recently decided to start a new backup; September 2015, which sucked up about 250GB, but archived the older 735GB folder. I have an older EVGA X58 SLI x3 motherboard that I bought in April 2009. It has the Intel i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz quad processor with 12 GB DDR3 1600 mamory. My backup HDD is a WD 1TB, but it is not the black. I must have just missed the newer X58 motherboard (MB) that came with USB 3.0 and only so I only have USB 2.0. No, I never got around to doing any over-clocking with this MB or adding more graphics cards to the SLI 2 or 3 slots. I don't do any gaming to speak of or any graphic arts that require that kind of fun. I decided it was time to upgrade my USB as I don't have the necessity to build a new computer, so I got this USB 3.0 card and installed it in the available secondary x16/x8 PCI Express 2 slot. I thought about trying it in the third x8 slot, but I read it needed to be in the x16, if not in the x1 slot, and I had other chores to perform. Unfortunately, this motherboard only has one PCI express x1 slot and it is covered by my GTX 285 video card. Anyway, I used the 4 pin to SATA power adapter cable, loaded the drivers from the CD and everything worked great. While I had hoped for a bit more speed, with the USB 3, the transfer to the Seagate went from 11+ hours to 4 hours and 15 minutes for the same file, which I deleted afterwards; only need 1. Anyway, I'll take the 2.5x faster speed. I'll update if I have any issues.

____ U P D A T E D ____ R E V I E W: The card installed fine, including the separate power port. The 4 ports on this expansion card do function. The speed of these ports should be as much as 10 times (1,000%) higher real-world throughput (400 MB/sec) compared with a USB 2.0 port (35-40 MB/sec), yet there was very little greater bandwidth than with USB 2. I performed tests using USB 3.0 thumbdrives which are rated at twice the speed of USB 2 and yet they performed barely higher on this USB 3 card (36 MB/sec) than on a USB 2 port (24 MB/sec) in the same machine. I tried the test using 2 different thumbdrives. The card does work but provides only 33% higher throughput compared with USB 2 ports when it should provide up to 1,000% higher throughput. The manufacturer of this card wants you to know that only the most recent operating systems from Microsoft will allow this card to reach speeds meaningfully-greater than a USB 2 port would provide. My computer uses Windows VISTA and the mfr says that that explains why this card could not perform anywhere nearly at USB 3 speed. That would mean that this card is of effectively no value or worth to most users of older PCs. Significantly-greater throughput is the primary likely reason to buy such a card - but they don't explain that only newer PCs which likely already have USB 3 ports would allow this card to perform like a USB 3 product. So, there is very little purpose in buying this product. Any newer PC will likely already have USB 3 ports. Instead of just very bad performance it means that this mfr is providing false hope to the millions who are using older operating systems. The fact that this card will act nearly the same as the older USB version 2 ports should be spelled out for everybody who reads this item's product description on Amazon or anywhere else. Not only will this card NOT provide USB 3 speed except on the newest of operating systems but it wastes money and it wastes a slot in your PC. This is unnecessary and also irresponsible marketing. The manufacturer says that they will try to update this product description so that it will tell you not to expect USB 3 performance from this product unless you have a very recent operating system on your PC. I hope that Amazon is apprised of this fact and takes appropriate action.

My ten year old computer originally had 5 USB ports, but after a storm (even with a surge protector) 3 of them quit working. I ordered this USB card to provide the ports I needed. It arrived quickly, packaged securely, fit in my desktop computer easily and included other power cords I didn't need. Windows 10 recognized it on first boot up. And all the ports work as they should. I'm happy.

A Solid Performer with Some Longevity Concerns I installed this Inateck PCI-e card into my older desktop to add some much-needed USB 3.0 ports. The installation process was straightforward. The card slid easily into an available PCI Express x1 slot, and I appreciated that the package included both a SATA power cable and a Molex-to-SATA adapter, which covered all the bases for my power supply setup. On my Windows 10 system, it was recognized immediately without any need to hunt down drivers, which is always a huge plus. The performance, when it works, is exactly as advertised. I’ve been using it to transfer large video files to an external SSD, and the speed is a night-and-day difference compared to the old USB 2.0 ports on my case. All four ports functioned correctly, providing stable connections for my devices. However, the reason for my middling score is a concern over long-term durability. After a period of consistent use, the card began to exhibit intermittent connectivity issues. One of the ports will occasionally disconnect and reconnect a device without warning. This isn't a constant problem, but it's frequent enough to be concerning and makes me hesitant to trust it with critical transfers or connected storage. I've reseated the card and ensured the power connection is secure, but the issue persists, pointing toward a potential flaw in the card's build or components. **Bottom Line:** This card does its job well initially and is a budget-friendly way to add fast USB 3.0 ports. For light, occasional use, it might be perfectly fine. But based on my experience, I have reservations about its reliability over time. If you need a set-it-and-forget-it solution for important peripherals or constant data transfer, you might want to consider investing in a model with a more robust reputation for durability.