USB 3 card for MacPro...

brianleahy

brianleahy

Colonel Panic
I recently bought a Micronet RAID drive. It came with a USB3 card of unspecified brand - and as near as I can tell, Micronet does not make it themselves.

The included driver disk contained nothing useful, alas, and so I'm hoping that - if I know what brand it is - I might have a shot at finding some drivers that will work.

Here are high-res pics of the card. If anyone recognizes it - or has suggestions how I might proceed - I'd really appreciate it.

BDL
 
At least one current PCI-E USB 3.0 card will work in a MacPro without installing any additional drivers:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macpro/index.html#d22dec2012
That would be the Orico brand cards.
Newegg seems to have some, but you may want to look at your own sources, too.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...sNodeId=1&Description=USB 3 card&name=USB 3.0

However, have you tried to install the card that you have?

I'm assuming that you are running an up-to-date Mountain Lion system.
Install the card in an available slot.
Boot your MacPro, and check in the System Information panel, and click on the USB tab.
Does that card show up as a USB bus? If you are not sure, you should compare to the same bus list, without the card installed.

You may be lucky, and the card works without installing any additional software.
Or, you may not be so lucky, and have something like the cal digit card, which appears to only work with its own software.
 
Yes, I have tried installing it, and using a few different 3rd party drivers with it - to no avail.

If I don't install any drivers, it does NOT show up in system profiler, alas.
 
So, it does show up as a device when you try other drivers?

Are you using Mountain Lion (10.8.2) - or the 10.6 that you have listed in your profile?
I think it's unlikely for USB 3.0 to work unless you are running Mountain Lion or newer.

You should find out if your _only_ choice is using _only_ that card for USB 3. Some drives, especially RAID setups, are hardware restricted.
Is the drive available if you plug in to the built-in USB ports on your MacPro? Obviously, won't be USB3 - but it will tell you if you need to keep trying with the card that came with the drive, or if _another_ card might work - such as the Orico.

What did you find out when you contacted Micronet for support?
 
I have in my 2008 Mac Pro the Caldigit USB 3 PCI two port card with the 10.8.x drivers (for the card) here. So see if these drivers help your card. Lastly the download page has a deinstaller to get rid of the drivers if needed.

The only caveat is they are a little slow in support for drivers when a new version of OS X comes out. So I usually wait a week or two for them to update their drivers.
 
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