We have been using USB 3.0 PCI-E Express cards in Dell and HP servers for a long time to be able to connect USB hard drives for external data backups . By default, today’s servers do not yet have USB 3.0 , which is why we rely on PCI-E cards. We tried several brands, such as Buffalo and the Inateck cards. When it comes to stability , the Inateck cards are clearly ahead, unfortunately the Buffalo cards do not always work properly.
After installing the card in the PCI-E slot , the cards are usually recognized correctly by the Windows operating system and a suitable driver is installed at the same time, as you can see here.
The Microsoft driver for the Renesas USB 3.0 host controller is installed in version 6.3.9600.17797. The connected 5TB USB hard drive WD-Green works perfectly, unfortunately the data throughput leaves something to be desired. As you can see here, we only get close to 60 MBit, the value should be much higher with USB 3.0 .
Then we installed the latest USB 3.0 driver from Renesas (RENESAS-USB3-Host-Driver-30230-setup.exe). The installation proceeds without further input, only the server has to be restarted at the end of the installation so that the driver is completely updated. The device manager then looks like this:
The Renesas driver version 3.0.23.0 is now installed. Then we measured the speed with the ” HD Speed ” tool again, just like the first attempt, and lo and behold, it was now much better. We now reached the average speed of almost 155 MBit per second in this test . Quite a good value we think.
So the installation of the Renesas USB 3.0 driver was really worth it.
If you are interested in further information on Windows drivers , you should take a closer look at the following articles.
– Prevent driver updates via Windows updates in Windows 10
– List Windows drivers with the Driverquery.exe command
– Delete driver packages (printers) from a Windows Server 2008 R2
– 32-bit printer driver problems on a Windows Server 2008 R2
– Driver backup and restore Double Driver
– Network printer
driver Deactivate installation query for Windows 7 clients – Create a list of the drivers used – Driver query