FS-U4L-Pro

Extra USB Ports Without the Hassle I installed this FebSmart PCIe 4-port USB 3.0 expansion card on a mid-tower Windows 10 desktop that was running low on available ports, and it worked right out of the box. Windows recognized the card instantly without needing extra drivers, and I appreciated that it doesn’t require a separate power connection. The self-powered design is a big plus because I didn’t have to mess with extra cables or worry about overloading the PSU. Performance is as expected for USB 3.0—transfer speeds are solid and stable, and all four ports can be used simultaneously without slowdown. I tested with external SSDs, flash drives, and even a USB headset, and everything connected seamlessly. The card sits securely in the PCIe slot and feels well-built, with no loose or flimsy components. One thing to note is that while this card does fine with most devices, really power-hungry peripherals (like certain external hard drives) may still prefer a powered hub for guaranteed stability. Also, keep in mind it occupies a PCIe slot, so plan accordingly if you’re short on expansion room. Bottom line: A reliable and hassle-free way to add fast USB 3.0 connectivity to an older or port-limited desktop PC, with the added convenience of not needing an extra power supply connection.

I have a full size tower, but I really like that the FS-U4 can be used in a mini-tower PC. I am not using this for a power source; I have a powered USB hard drive attached. It installed flawlessly in the case, and Windows 10 recognized it at boot with no extra help. Data coming from a USB 2.0 hard drive via the mainboard port to the USB 3.0 hard drive is about 32MB/s (~320Mb/s) ... which is a lot faster than when the same USB 3.0 hard drive was connected to the USB 2.0 port. It can write about 131MB/s coming from the SATA C: hard drive to the USB 3.0 hard drive. The only complaint I could have, is that I wish it came with a 'Y-splitter' power cable. I have a 750W power supply, but the power connectors are limited. ----------2019/03/20---------- Bummer. Microsoft just upgraded me to Win 10 Version 10.0.18356 Build 18356 last week, and this is no longer working. I have uninstalled and re-installed vendor and Microsoft drivers, but cannot get to work any more. The USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller just shows a little yellow triangle in Device Manager, and the Reneasys driver only sticks around until reboot, then it gets replaced with the xHCI one. The explanation is very helpful: This device cannot start (Code 10).

I'd read that W10 would detect the hardware and auto install the drivers for it. Not so in my case. I think it depends on how old your machine is and what hardware you have. My machine is a good 10 years old, but it has an early iteration of an i7, with added memory to at least give me 8GB there. But it did turn out to have a working PCIe card slot, and this fit perfectly. Not my main machine but a side project to see how I can keep it running at a fairly high level. A couple notes: it showed up in Device Manager as an unknown device, and not under USB controllers. I tried installing the drivers straight from W10 but no dice. So I installed the drivers from the little cd included with purchase. It required a restart after that before finally detecting the brand name under USB controllers in Device Manager. So...you might need to ignore the troubleshooting tips in the included pamphlet instructions like I did...as it called for reseating the card after failure to detect as intended. In the end: seat the PCIe on your motherboard, then install the drivers off the cd, then reboot, then check and make sure it took in Device Manager (if your system doesn't detect it right away and install drivers from DM).

The item arrived as described in a well packaged box. Installation went fine and Windows 10 immediately recognized the chipset and downloaded the latest Microsoft approved drivers. I have 3 devices, all USB 3, attached to this board. I/O to and from the devices connected to this board, to other devices NOT connected to this board is very fast >200mb/sec. However, any transfers between devices connected to this board slows down to USB 2 speeds around 55mb/sec. Not sure why this is happening. I will contact tech support after more testing.

This card would constantly fail to start in one older high end pc. I put it aside but I recently built a new high end audio/video workstation and decided to try this card again. After extensive testing, using a USB 3.1 samsung flash drive with over 20 GB of data on it and writing to a 2 TB NVME M.2 with over 1.8 TB of space and setting the card properties for best performance, I was getting up to 280 MB/Sec speeds. That was fantastic and close to the max specified speed of the flash drive itself. However, it would continually fail - never could move more than 16 GB of data without stopping and showing an 'Out of Memory' error. With 64 GB system memory and 60 of it available, seems like a driver or card issue. I did the same test with the 3.0 ports directly on the motherboard back plane, same flash drive and test and never had any issue with it completing. I then upped the the amount of data on flash drive and had the same results. Basically, I give this card a one star because what's the point in a 3.0 usb interface if it can't transfer large amounts of data consistently? Isn't that the point of buying it in the first place? Looking at the other reviews, it appears some others have recognized the same problem.

Great picture, thanks, I know. The card being reviewed is the bottom card, and you can see blue light coming from the open two ports; the other two are in use. The card does not cause the blue light, but I grabbed some fancy CPU cooler to keep my CPU from melting. The card is small, plugged into an open PCI-E port, and comes with two back panel plates, one for a tighter chassis design and the other for a traditional full-sized case. It plugged in, and it just worked on my Windows 10 older AMD computer (like 10ish years old). I have used hard drives via the card's USB 3 and had no issues. While I doubt my system can push the card to the max, the motherboard only had 2 USB 3 ports, and I needed more. For the $20, this is a cheap upgrade.

This product was easy to install because it came with the low-profile bracket, but it doesn't provide enough power. The product page claims it has enough power to support all the devices. It does not. I hooked 3 external SSDs up to it, and they kept crashing. I figured out it was because this thing wasn't providing enough power for all of them. I moved a few things around, so only 1 SSD is plugged into this, and the other 2 are on the motherboard. The problem is fixed. I'd still recommend it, but if you have higher power devices don't expect to use all of them on this.

works great with WMR, I had been having trouble with at least two different brand usb cards including inatek and the gigabyte onboard usb 3.0 from etron was absolute garbage. DO NOT INSTALL THE DRIVERS, the renesas drivers or whatever they are called are for windows 7 an windows XP, do not install them on the most recent edition of windows 10. the card will work fine, even great on generic windows 10 drivers. if you do install the driver windows home portal will start giving you error 15's and you will have to completely uninstall mixed reality to fix it. this card has no front usb 3.0 port internal conncetors? Why? I guess to keep the cost down but I would have prefered to pay a little more to have front connections. keep in mind this has VERTICAL USB SLOTS, so if you have a tight metal case, you may have to squeeze or bend your usb cables to get them in.