The problem is, there are no native Mac drivers for these generic cards. I even thought of titling this post “omfg usb expresscard mac how-to” because it would probably get more traffic that way from all the frustration that’s been caused. Most of these generic (or Windows) cards will not work out of the box though, and all the instructions I found on the internet for getting them to work are a colossal headache and flawed. There are some Mac-specific cards too, but the hardware is identical and you pay extra for the privilege. You can use any expresscard/34 USB 3.0 adapter that has the µPD720200 or µPD720202 (uPD720200 or uPD720202) controller, and in fact there are some very cheap ones on eBay these days too, including ones that are entirely flush (i.e., they don’t stick out at all so you can leave them in all the time) and have two ports instead of just one. So with this Startech device I’ve added an extra USB 3.0 port, and preliminary tests show it’s up to 3x faster transferring files to my USB 3.0 hard drive. My computer has three USB 2.0 ports and an empty ExpressCard slot (thank you Apple!). One of the best uses I found for the ExpressCard/34 slot on my Early 2011 17″ MacBook Pro is in the form of a USB 3.0 expansion card.
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