Or if you have a high-end SATA RAID controller and you're not using all of its ports, you could run a spare port to an E-SATA connector and configure that port as a JBOD. Any PCIe 3.0 card will work perfectly fine on a PCIe 2.0 slot without any issues Per lane speed on on a second gen PCIe card is around 500 MB/s which doubles in the third-generation PCIe cards. Your only cheap way to get full SATA 2 or better speeds would be an E-SATA cable plugged into a spare SATA port on your motherboard. It would be slightly better if you could find a USB 3.0 controller that used a four-lane PCIe slot but really, I doubt you'll notice a performance difference.ītw, most of the cheap add-in SATA controllers with E-SATA ports also run single lane PCIe, so that wouldn't be a help. Even a SATA 2 SSD won't be much bothered.

So unless you're running a solid state drive over that USB 3.0 link the single lane PCIe is not going to limit your performance. Of course actual rotating hard drives don't even tax SATA 1 unless you're strictly moving data to and from the drive's onboard cache. SATA 1, 2, and 3 provide 150, 300, and 600 megabytes/sec, respectively. USB 3.0 is supposed to achieve 3.2 Gbit/sec (400 megabytes/sec) usable throughput.īUT. A single lane of PCIe - and every PCIe USB 3.0 add-in controller I can find uses only one lane, regardless of what slot you plug it into - is good for 250 megabytes/second - two gigabits/sec.

Usb 3 card pcie2