Why USB 3.0 is slower than SATA

Thanks for the work and sharing. I've watched the comments on Marvel chipset used by Gigabyte and others and the poor performance of their motherboards with the USB3/SATA chip.

Giving laptop owners something more than USB2, anything, but include an eSATA port that has so far not happened on any Mac other than with 'surgery' such as the OWC iMac upgrade, to make external storage more useful.

One thing with USB3, there is enough power to charge an iPad!

Recently I purchased a USB 3.0 1TB LaCie d2 with the USB PCI card for use with a new Mac Pro. My purpose was to use it as an external bootable backup. The PCI card install is just as easy as you would suspect. The drivers were problematic. Sometimes the LaCie would mount on the desktop and sometimes not. During my experimenting it took uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers about every second or third boot. I did that 4 different times during the brief time I had the device. There was one deal-breaker for me. No matter what tricks I tried, I was unable to boot from the LaCie.

After contacting tech support and being bumped up to a higher level than the first tier tech support it was finally agreed upon to give me a refund. My assumption which was not confirmed or commented upon by the engineers was that the drivers were system level and the drive was not recognized in EFI so bootability was lacking. I should add that when I did get the drive functioning and performed a SuperDuper backup of my system the speed was almost exactly 2x that of FireWire 800 when cloning a drive with about 670GB of data. Unfortunately I couldn't boot from it...

Most PCIe cards aren't bootable on Mac Pro 2009 or later, so being bootable is the rare exception rather than any norm. And not as critical with 4+ internal drives and the option to use FW800 or even USB2.

Maybe when USB3 is implemented at the motherboard it would be bootable.

Seems like good idea to continue to stay away from LaCie.

The value of an external bootable drive is grab-and-go in emergencies. In the last three years we've been threatened twice by forest fires and had to evacuate during one of them. No time for moving a whole system but grab a backup and I'm good to continue a digital life even if the physical one is destroyed.

I wish I had known about the inability to boot from a PCI card in the new Mac Pros but am grateful you mentioned that, Hatter. My last OWC FW800 external backup has some internal connection issue so it is time for a new external backup. You saved me from discovering that a PCI eSata card would be a losing strategy.

However it appears that the Newer eSata Cable Extender which connects to one of the optical ports will provide on eSata connector which is supposed to be bootable (according to OWC's Tech Support). Here's hoping!

Message was edited by: Welles Goodrich

The NewerTech came out and was mostly intended for when the ports were there but not used. Otherwise just put a drive in lower optical drive bay as you don't have spare ODD ports in 2009.

MaxUpgrades does have a kit meant for SSDs but includes PCI Express card, just haven't seen what they use.

I have not had an issue with OWC FW800 cases (knock on wood) but I have replaced and upgraded the drives a couple times over.