Buffalo PCI USB 3 Interface Card

Most computer users will be familiar with the USB connections found on nearly all computers. USB 3 is the latest version of the standard that offers considerably higher transfer speeds than its predecessors.

At its top speed a USB 3 device is capable of running around ten times faster than a USB 2 device, though there is one important catch: that is faster than a hard disk is physically able to transfer data, so if you are using a USB 3 hard disk it will be faster than USB 2, but not much.

Some newer computers will have USB 3 sockets built in but if yours does not you will need an adapter card such as Buffalo’s PCI USB 3.0 interface Card. It’s a small card so it’s suitable for fitting in the smaller home entertainment PCs, though it’s not for laptops (a separate Buffalo card for laptops is available).

It was easy to fit – you will need a spare PCI Express slot on the computer’s motherboard – and automatically picked up by Windows when we restarted the computer. It gives two extra ports which work at the USB 3 speed (the computer’s other ports remain at the old speed).

USB 3 is ‘backwards compatible’ so you can plug a USB 2 device into the USB 3 card, or you can plug a USB 3 device into a USB 2 socket. You won’t get the fast speeds but it will work.

We tried it with the Seagate Freeagent Go Flex which has both USB 3 and USB 2 connections (see below). Transfers were roughly twice as quick over USB 3 as USB 2 (11 minutes over USB 2, dropping to five over USB 3, to write a 12GB file, with comparable read speeds), which was an example of running up against the hard disk’s speed limit – if you were to use a USB 3 device with flash memory it would be faster.

The £40 RRP is high but it's available for just over half that online, at which price the Buffalo PCI USB 3 card is good value.