Sweex 2 Port Superspeed USB3 Expresscard adapter

This device (Sweex 2 Port Superspeed USB3 Expresscard adapter, model number US111) is designed to plug into a laptop's Expresscard socket and provide it with two USB 3 ports.

USB3 is the most recent, faster edition of the USB specification, and when used between compatible devices and computers it provides for data transfer much faster than with the older USB2.

It doesn't come with much documentation – there's a tiny sheet of paper that rather pointlessly explains the company founder's philosophy and another that pictures the device being inserted into an Expresscard slot.

But when we plugged it in, we found that it wasn't recognised, so we tried using the supplied CD. This crashed, though it may have been because we were using the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

The Sweex website was slightly more useful – it listed several downloads, though without any explanation. One of them turned out to be a working driver, and once it was installed the card worked perfectly.

We tried it with the Kingston Hyper Max device, which copied data twice as fast as when it was plugged into a USB2 socket. You can plug in USB2 devices too, though they won't work at the faster speed.

The US111 is available from Stuff UK