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PFU3-2P ORICO USB 3.0 PCI Card Stopped Working El Capitan 10.11

Hi there,


I have had 3 of the ORICO PFU3-2P USB 3.0 PCI E cards on my MacPro4,1 for a while now. They were running fine natively on my system without any additional driver. Last night after updating to El Capital 10.11 they have stopped working. They show up in the PCI section in the system info and they also show as having drivers installed for them. In the USB section in system info they don't show as USB High Speed or USB Superspeed anymore as they did before. They show as USB 3.0 Bus and Host Controller Driver is AppleUSBXHCIPCI.

I have tried installing the GenericUSBXHCI driver, that didn't help.

I tried installing a fresh copy of El Capitan on another pre-formatted drive, that didn't help either.

I have also tried to power one card from one of the SATA bays, and that didn't help either.

I have started getting kernel panics when I restart my Mac Pro.

The computer seems a lot more slow than before. And for some reason all of my external drives do not have proper permissions anymore and I had to tick the "Ignore ownership on this drive".


Any help would be appreciated.


Thanks,

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11), Early 2009 MacPro4,1

Posted on Oct 3, 2015 2:27 AM

Reply
8 replies

Oct 3, 2015 9:38 AM in response to lllaass

Well the conventional wisdom is that these 2 port versions of the ORICO USB 3.0 PCI cards does not need additional drivers and run natively on the Macs. I know the 4 ports versions also run natively, but it needs extra power. It is said since it has the FL1100 chipset, it can be run natively. However, ORICO recommends using GenericUSBXHCI driver for those macs that the cards don't work with. The GenericUSBXHCI driver has not been updated in more than years, and I am not having my hopes up for any updates soon. I have contacted ORICO customer support, haven't heard back yet.

Oct 3, 2015 6:26 PM in response to lllaass

lllaass wrote:


...

- Note that CalDigit has even worse problem with their USB 3 cards. The cause a kernel panic when installing El Capitain. The card has to be removed to install El Capitan.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18470

FWIW, the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works in the 2010 Mac Pro running El Capitan. There are no drivers to install. Only complaint is that the USB 3.0 connection isn't bootable; the eSATA connection is.

Oct 3, 2015 7:09 PM in response to lllaass

lllaass wrote:


- Note that CalDigit has even worse problem with their USB 3 cards. The cause a kernel panic when installing El Capitain. The card has to be removed to install El Capitan.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18470


This may not be quite accurate. The CalDigit driver is definitely a problem, as far as I can tell, but probably not the card itself, at least not in a 2010 Mac Pro. I suspect that the report you mentioned may have come from someone who had upgraded an existing system to El Capitan. I installed the El Capitan beta clean on a test drive, and didn't run into the cycle of endless restarts and panics until I installed the Caldigit Yosemite driver to see if it would work with El Cap. Before I did that, and then again after I re-installed El Cap and ran it without the driver, my Mac Pro was and remains stable with the card in place. I just can't access drives attached to it if I am booted into El Capitan. I hope CalDigit updates the drivers, but I'm not optimistic. There was a Yosemite driver (which is the one I've been using), but that has disappeared from their support area.

Oct 4, 2015 6:22 PM in response to FatMac-MacPro

FatMac>MacPro wrote:


lllaass wrote:


...

- Note that CalDigit has even worse problem with their USB 3 cards. The cause a kernel panic when installing El Capitain. The card has to be removed to install El Capitan.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18470

FWIW, the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works in the 2010 Mac Pro running El Capitan. There are no drivers to install. Only complaint is that the USB 3.0 connection isn't bootable; the eSATA connection is.


That must be the Rev 2 version of the card; the second gen card requires 10.8.2 or newer, and needs no drivers. I have the first gen card, which does require software. CalDigit seems to only be supporting its use in 10.6 through 10.9 now. So it must only be those of us with the first gen card who are not going to be able to use it with El Capitan.

Oct 5, 2015 6:51 AM in response to kahjot

kahjot wrote:


...That must be the Rev 2 version of the card; the second gen card requires 10.8.2 or newer, and needs no drivers. I have the first gen card, which does require software. CalDigit seems to only be supporting its use in 10.6 through 10.9 now. So it must only be those of us with the first gen card who are not going to be able to use it with El Capitan.

I think there may be a "Rev 2" of the first gen card, and both need drivers to support USB 3. Facing the inevitable jump to Yosemite, I replaced the original card with the "Pro" card and that works without need for any drivers so it functions with Yosemite and El Cap.

Oct 5, 2015 8:15 AM in response to FatMac-MacPro

FatMac>MacPro wrote:


kahjot wrote:


...That must be the Rev 2 version of the card; the second gen card requires 10.8.2 or newer, and needs no drivers. I have the first gen card, which does require software. CalDigit seems to only be supporting its use in 10.6 through 10.9 now. So it must only be those of us with the first gen card who are not going to be able to use it with El Capitan.

I think there may be a "Rev 2" of the first gen card, and both need drivers to support USB 3. Facing the inevitable jump to Yosemite, I replaced the original card with the "Pro" card and that works without need for any drivers so it functions with Yosemite and El Cap.

That's certainly possible; both would support Snow Leopard through Mavericks using the CalDigit drivers. BTW there was a Yosemite driver at one point, that was never listed but was included a while ago in the collection of drivers for 10.6 through 10.9. That Yosemite driver has since vanished from the support area, unless it has reappeared very recently. The card to have, if you don't need a card that will work with anything older than Mountain Lion 10.8.2, is evidently the newer CalDigit driverless card.

PFU3-2P ORICO USB 3.0 PCI Card Stopped Working El Capitan 10.11

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