Vantec 4 Port USB 3.0 PCIe with Internal 20 pin Host Card (UGT-PC345)

If you need PCIe add-on USB cards, you can't go past Vantec. I'm an IT professional, I've used pretty much every USB add-on card with a decent brand name on it (and plenty without) - the Vantec cards are hands down the most reliable. I've had USB ports stop responding, burn out, crash the whole OS whenever anything is plugged into them. Mostly, I've seen ports incapable of sustaining the speed they are certified for. If the USB architecture built into Intel chipsets is the gold standard, then Vantec cards get the silver award, and no other brand even rates (because Marvell don't produce add-on cards directly, so manufacturer brand can cause Marvell product quality to vary wildly). Vantec cards provide the highest performance I've seen from non-Intel solutions, with the most stable and reliable operation. I've seen front panel ports that couldn't power a USB3.0 HDD, but they've never failed, burnt out or crashed the OS - they simply don't present the drive to the OS. I've *never* had a Vantec card fail to present a drive connected to a rear panel port. So if I need to add USB ports to a PC, workstation or even server, I insist on Vantec. I even have to import them most of the time, because there is very little local supply. I can say with great confidence that Vantec should be on the top of your shortlist, and even if it was the only brand you even considered, you wouldn't go wrong - that's where I'm at, after spending hundreds of dollars over the last twenty years evaluating various alternative products. Highly recommended.

I added this to a ryzen system to have more stable USB for an audio interface without other USB devices causing issues. So far this seems to have worked great, HOWEVER, I found that I had to avoid installing the drivers and use the default Windows drivers instead. Otherwise some devices wouldn't function correctly. The drivers are really only for Windows 7 and below.

So there I was with a new Oculus Quest 2 in hand. Hooked it up to my desktop pc, and only got a few hours of playtime before my headset died. So I got on Amazon and found this slim usb-c card and picked one up, since it looked to be a great price. Plopped that baby right in my pci-e slot and my headset now has infinite power while hooked to my desktop. Windows 10 (may 2020 update) detected the device and set it up without need of the driver CD. For those using slim cases, this card also includes a swappable faceplate for low profile pc's. For, reference, the card, I got had one USB-C port and one USB-A port, and is powered via a SATA power connector that attaches to the board for a constant power feed to usb devices. Highly recommend this for new quest 2 owners who have an existing usb-c port that doesn't feed enough power to keep the headset charged!

I'll start by saying this card is great overall. I'm writing my review because it's so far a good product and on multiple sites, I could not find more than half a dozen reviews total. The good - This card functions as it should for USB 3.0. It added 3.0 to a computer that was built before the standard existed. I had an extra PCIe slot and this fit right in. No issues installing it and it also has the bonus of being fully powered and coming with the correct cable to do this. I saw other cards weren't powered except by what the motherboard provides through the PCIe slot and this isn't always enough to power devices correctly. My only USB 3.0 product probably wouldn't have trouble, but others may so why not go with a card that does it right? The drivers installed without a problem and the included instructions for install (both driver and the card) were good. I plugged my USB 3.0 drive in and noticed speeds approximately 5x as fast as the same drive was on the same computer over USB 3.0. Clearly the 10x promise is synthetic benchmarks that most of us won't ever see in the real world. I'll take half the stated speed increase because it's still greatly faster. Plus this gave my computer a few extra USB slots - I had 1 open on the back and I"d like to have more than that so this solved that problem too. I have some up on the front - but those aren't ideal to plug peripherals into or things you're going to be using semi-permanently. The Bad (or the not so good) - I'll start with the more obvious one. This technically is a 4 port device. The big 'but' here is one is on the inside and it's the typical external type plug. I can't think of any time this would be needed inside of a case really. If i wanted to punch out a panel on the front to have forward USB 3.0, any adapter like that has plugs that work on internal USB standards, not the external ones. I knew this going into to using the card but it's really odd on Vantec's part - I didn't see any other USB PCIe card made this way. I guess if you take an external hard drive and plug it into the port and somehow put it inside your case then it has a use. The second thing is while the drivers are great, Windows 8 seems finicky about them. Whenever I log onto my computer it takes and lags a couple of seconds to see the card and it acts like is just being plugged in. This shouldn't happen and I did notice even on Vantec's site they don't have Windows 8 support at this time for it. I know they don't abandon their products because I saw some others on the site that were updated to 8, so I'll hold out hope for that. Overall it's great and updated an older computer to a faster I/O standard. It also gave me some extra USB ports, which I didn't immediately need, but I was running short on. If you have an extra PCIe slot and need to upgrade to the 3.0 standard or just add more of them, this is a great way to go.

Compré esta tarjeta ya que actualice mi ordenador y no tomé en cuenta que la tarjeta madre no incluye conector USB 3.0 de 20 pines para los puertos frontales de mi gabinete, al instalarla de manera automática la reconoció el sistema operativo, funcionan muy bien tanto los puertos de la tarjeta como los frontales y ofrecen una gran velocidad de transferencia.

Items arrived very well packed and in perfect condition. I upgraded an old Biostar AM2+ motherboard with those. I am pleased how the final configuration turned out.

Used to provide USB 3.0 capability on Dell Inspiron 580 running Linux Mint 18.3 Plugged into PCIe slot and connected to SCSI power via supplied adapter cable. The card and USB ports were active on reboot and recognised correctly as USB 3.0 without having to do anything else. I ran a number of benchmarks to connected external 2TB Toshiba drive using rsync. The write speed on the card was about 4-5 times faster than on the USB 2.0 ports on the PC.

I have a FreeNAS running on a ASRock 2750D4I in a Fractal Design node304 case. The 2750d4i does not have USB3 headers for the Fractal Design's USB3 ports in the front of the case. This card was essentially plug/play. It was recognized in FreeNAS 9.10 (freebsd 10.3) with zero configuration. The motherboard recognized the card immediately. I was able to boot off of it using a USB thumb drive to install FreeNAS on an SSD. Excellent card for very good price. If you need USB3 for FreeNAS/FreeBSD get this card! I haven't run a USB3 drive off of it long term. Will report back and update if I run into any problems. == Update Dec 1/2017 == I plugged a 8TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub (STEL8000100) into the USB ports on the card. FreeNAS immediately recognized the drive and I was able to format and add it as a new volume from the web interface. I ran an rsync of about 3TB of data and it seemed to be able to maintain 100MB/sec for most files. Since it was transferring a lot of small files (photos/short video clips) it was limited to the drives latency. Considering everything was plug/play with FreeBSD/FreeNAS I 100% recommend this card! Here are some basic drive benchmarks which shows the drive at about 160MB/sec. Not bad for a large slow disk over USB3. [/mnt/backup-drive]$ sudo diskinfo -c /dev/da0p1 /dev/da0p1 512 # sectorsize 2147483648 # mediasize in bytes (2.0G) 4194304 # mediasize in sectors 4096 # stripesize 0 # stripeoffset 261 # Cylinders according to firmware. 255 # Heads according to firmware. 63 # Sectors according to firmware. NA8TANVT # Disk ident. I/O command overhead: time to read 10MB block 0.076785 sec = 0.004 msec/sector time to read 20480 sectors 7.734282 sec = 0.378 msec/sector calculated command overhead = 0.374 msec/sector [/mnt/backup-drive]$ sudo diskinfo -t /dev/da0p1 /dev/da0p1 512 # sectorsize 2147483648 # mediasize in bytes (2.0G) 4194304 # mediasize in sectors 4096 # stripesize 0 # stripeoffset 261 # Cylinders according to firmware. 255 # Heads according to firmware. 63 # Sectors according to firmware. NA8TANVT # Disk ident. Seek times: Full stroke: 250 iter in 1.916064 sec = 7.664 msec Half stroke: 250 iter in 1.406035 sec = 5.624 msec Quarter stroke: 500 iter in 3.445663 sec = 6.891 msec Short forward: 400 iter in 4.452117 sec = 11.130 msec Short backward: 400 iter in 5.464824 sec = 13.662 msec Seq outer: 2048 iter in 0.777240 sec = 0.380 msec Seq inner: 2048 iter in 0.781765 sec = 0.382 msec Transfer rates: outside: 102400 kbytes in 0.638526 sec = 160369 kbytes/sec middle: 102400 kbytes in 0.634159 sec = 161474 kbytes/sec inside: 102400 kbytes in 0.634815 sec = 161307 kbytes/sec

Installed easily without a thought or care on Win10 system. Works out of the box. Tested speeds using Samsung T7 SSD (USB 3.2 Gen 2, so the bottleneck in speeds is sure to be this product being rated only at USB 3.1) onto a 2.5" A400 Kingston SSD. Copied over 10gigs of videos to be sure speeds weren't simply registering devices' built-in cache as would be the case transferring smaller files. Performed markedly better than USB 3.1 Gen 1, which transferred the same files at roughly. Based on the speeds I got, it'l likely an nvme ssd would go even faster on the USB-C connector since 320MB/s is roughly the limit of SATA SSD's. Considering my external ssd was as fast as my internal SSD I was fully satisfied not testing further. Great value, good product. Far beyond the needs of most home users and perfectly luxurious speeds for creative professionals with massive files to manage. Highly recommended.