14 DAY TRIAL // Native USB 3.0 support may no longer be just a dream, but some might still decide they could do with some extra connectors, or give some to systems without the interface, so Emt and Akasa put the VLI four-port controller to work.
The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface standard is one that promises a bandwidth of up to 5 Gbps, ten times that of USB 2.0.
As such, it is not surprising to learn of the existence of USB 3.0 add-on cards, especially with how the standard relied on third-party controller chips for quite a while.
It is this very sort of add-in-board that Emt and Akasa have developed, based on a single VLI host controller.
In the past, there have been such things as implementations that used four Fresco Logic FL1000 single-port USB 3.0 controllers, plus a PCI Express bridge chip, among other things.
The four-port VLI USB 3.0 cards, however, two in number, need a single VLI chip for all four connectors to be functional.
Granted, this does mean that all ports will share the same PCI Express 2.0 lane, meaning that all of them won't work at full speeds at once.
Fortunately, this won't really be much of a problem, since it will only interfere with transfers when four individual SATA 6 Gbps SSDs are connected and tasked with copying data all at the same time.
Needless to say, the above sort of situation doesn't usually arise, so Akasa's AK-PCCU3-03 and Ent's own model should do just fine.
Ent's model hasn't really been detailed well, but it differs from the other one though its port arrangement and PCB.
More specifically, it is colored red and has all four ports on the back, while Akasa's product (is colored blue) has just three, with the fourth one available internally.
The only disadvantage that the VLI USB 3.0 host controller has is that it has yet to pass USB-IF certification tests. Then again, many mainboards use similarly unrecognized ASMedia and Etron chips, so this shouldn't prove to much of an issue.
