USB3 for Mac

[photopianeil]

Hi,
I just wanted to let Mac users know about my experience with USB3.  As many know, Mac has yet to support USB3 despite its speed and the ubiquity of available drives. I almost went for the new LaCie card for $49 until I found it was locked to only LaCie drives and unrevealed to the consumer!  I thought the CalDigit one at OWC was pricey at $79, but was definitely a better deal since I have plenty of non-LaCie drives which I can put into usb3 cases for external use.  SO I ordered a 2.5" external case for a 7200 500gb drive and the card.  Only one problem, the driver didn't work and I had to wait until today to contact CalDigit to send me the new driver.  It works fine now and I am very pleased with the speed (very little difference from SATA to SATA), but also the power.  I had this drive in a firewire 800 case and it didn't always run properly due to lack of power especially when it got hot. It now seems to run much cooler in the OWC plastic case than it did in the FW aluminum one.  I am even thinking about getting another card, and replacing my eSATA external cases with USB3 ones for the pair of 2TB 3.5" drives I use for backup. I still need to see if I can find an app which will give me my actual read/write speed to compare eSATA with USB3.  I understand the theoretical limits have little to do with actual throughput.
Neil

[Jack Flesher]

The practical maximum I/O for a 2.5" 7200 RPM spinner is about 80MB/s or right at FW800 capacity, but most will still be slower than that.  A more useful test bed would be an SSD compared on the USB3, FW800 and eSATA interfaces.  Just time how long it takes to read and write a folder with 10Gigs of image files in it on each port.  

[StuartOnline]

I purchase a LaCie USB 3.0 ExpressCard34 in order to use a USB 3.0 external hard drives with my MacBook Pro 15" 2.66 8GB DDR3 (June 2009 model). Not knowing at the time that it would not work with other USB 3.0 hard drives (Iomega or an OWC Mercury On-the Go Pro) I ended up purchasing the LaCia USB 3.0 500GB 7200 RPM external portable hard drive. Now I loaded the driver software for the LaCie USB 3.0 ExpressCard34 via the LaCie Website in order to run on the MacBook Pro. However after plugging the LaCia USB 3.0 hard drive into the ExpressCard34 no connection. So I had to use the external USB power cord. Now it found the drive. So far so good. Problems started after trying to transfer data from a firewire 800 portable hard drive to the LaCie USB 3.0. First it was very slow. In fact it was slower then USB 2.0. Then about half way through the transfer it just stopped and lost connection with the USB 3.0 hard drive. Could not find the USB 3.0 hard drive after that unless I rebooted the MacBook Pro.

Now I tried this a number of times with no success. Now even when I click on "open" it will open the USB 3.0 hard , but for some reason after doing that it loses connection. You must then reboot in order for the drive to be found.

I finally after hours of fooling with this just gave up and will stick with Firewire 800 where I have no problems.

Just wondering now if anyone else has tried using a LaCie USB 3.0 ExpressCard34 with their MacBook Pro and had any luck?


Followup:  After doing more research I found that there looks to be a problem with express slots with Macbook Pro 2008/2009: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12766645#12766645