Express card for MacBook Pro

No driver unless the vendor has one. Does the vendor indicate compatibility with Mac OS X? have you contacted ST Lab?

http://www.st-lab.com/services.asp

I too have this model and would like to upgrade the BCM94321MC card with a newer dual-band card using the 3rd antennae wire that is already in the MBP. Anyone have suggestions?

If you look in SYSTEM PROFILER>HARDWARE>PCI CARDS, an Express Card should be recognized if you have installed one. Also in the menu bar on top of your desk top this icon should be present if you have one inserted:

Not knowing what type of card you have, you might contact ST Labs for additional information.

Ciao.

Apple does not support USB 3.0 so understand that you will not attain the USB 3.0 transmit speeds. It should work at the USB 2.0 speeds due to the backward comparability feature.

I use it with an eSata adapter to achieve fast transmit speeds (faster than USB and Firewire) which you might consider.

Ciao.

I just bought the same st-lab USB3.0 expresscard on offer from Maplin, to try in a 17" unibody MBP, 2009 running Snow Leopard.

I downloaded and installed the LaCie USB 3.0 driver, which recognized the card, since it uses the same chipset as Lacie's adapter and LaCie don't seem to have enforced any vendor tie-in (they might have for usb3.0 drives, though, not sure yet).

In System Profiler (About this Mac -> More Info) it shows up under PCI regardless of driver, and, with the LaCie driver installed, it appears also under USB as a "USB Super-Speed Bus".

I haven't tried it with a USB 3.0 drive yet (none to hand) but it runs USB2.0 drives just fine, power issues notwithstanding (it won't supply enough to run e.g. an Iomega 1TB USB2.0 pocket drive - needs a 2-ended USB cable with extra power supplied from one of the Mac's USB ports, or external 5v plugged into its power socket).

I haven't tried it on a Thunderbolt equipped mac (mine is too old for that), but the LaCie driver claims to be Lion compatible.

I also downloaded CalDigit drivers - these are based on open source code so while people report that the driver as-supplied doesn't work with non-CalDigit drives, they do provide source code under the GPL. which one could readily modify to suit other vendors. The also provide a brief PDF doc describing (very vaguely) the process to build the driver from source - this is enough for a reasonably experienced programmer but won't be of any use to the average user. The CalDigit documntation suggests issues with thunderbolt systems, implying that some or other Apple update may have stopped their driver working (this is speculation - when the LaCie driver worked I didn't investigate further.)

All trademarks acknowledged, and it goes without saying that neither Apple, ST-Lab, Lacie nor CalDigit will support any of this in this context.

Update: a more recent thread suggests that CalDigit drivers don't do vendor tie-in now, and people have been having trouble with the LaCie ones and Mountain Lion updates (though this seems in some cases to come down to just power limiting, easily addressed with "Y" cables and/or external supplies) - best to search other threads to get the latest info and check out the current situation.

I think Apple would prefer people to use Thunderbolt, and to be honest if Thunderbolt drives were readily and cheaply available, personally I'd be only too happy to. At time of writing, though, the cheapest thunderbolt portable drive I can find is about twice the price for a terabyte than the a typical USB3.0 version, and the Seagate GoFlex TB adapter is inexplicably large and ugly compared with their USB2.0, USB3.0 and firewire adapters, and just the adapter alone costs significantly more than a 1TB drive - the drive will cost extra again.