Adding USB 3.0 to a case that doesn't have one

[Jskid]

I've been looking for a new case and want USB 3.0 I've come to the realization it is much cheaper to buy a USB 2.0 case and add a PCI-E adapter to give USB 3 ports. Is there any down side to doing that? For example would the USB 3 ports run slower since there connected through PCI-E?

 

[lopdog]

I'm no expert on this, but AFAIK the PCIe interface should be fast enough. If you read about PCIe specifications on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express) the speed is much higher than the 5Gbps USB3 can reach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB_3.0).

 

[Jskid]

I wasn't sure which capacity to read, are all motherboards "16 lane slot (each direction): v3.0: 16 GB/s (128 Gbit/s)" these days?

 

[lopdog]

According to Wikipedia "Most motherboards sold currently come with PCI Express 2.1 connectors." The PCIe card you linked to says

Fully compliant with PCI-E Card Base Specification Revision 2.0, This PCI-E Card 3.0 card features four external SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports that can provide data transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps

and as far as I can see it's PCIe x1 (the smallest size, take a look at http://serverfault.com/questions/11633/whats-the-bandwidth-and-form-factor-for-pcie-x1-x4-x8-and-x16.
That would give a bandwith of up 4-5 Gbps.

I my opinion you wouldn't notice any difference between the two options you mention, and the speed depends on many factors, like the speed of the device you connect.

 

[delph2222]

usb 3.0 on pci-e interface fast as chuff

Hi
My gaming mate has stacks of data backed up and he currenly went out and bought USB3.0 external hard drives thinking he had USB3.0 cause it was a newish PC. Anyway he didnt, so he went out and bought a usb 3.0 pcie card fit it and said the speed was unbelievable he edits movie etc and need to backup large video files and he was said it was roughly true that usb 3.0 was 10x quicker than usb2.0 so in answer i asked him and he said awesome, so if i was you i would just go out and but a pcie usb3.0 card.
hope this helps