Anyone tried a USB3.0 Express adapter card with Puppy?

[gychang]

I have a laptop with USB 2.0, but would like to upgrade to 3.0 (if possible 3.1). Mine has an express card slot. Seems many cards are for windows platform.

Anyone have experience with puppy and any working USB 3.0 cards?

[mikewalsh]

Hi, Greg.

Now; when you say "Express card slot", what are you actually referring to?

Are you talking about a bigger version of an SD card slot.....an external slot you can plug a card into? Or are you talking about an internal slot, usually accessed from behind a 'door' or cover..? The latter are often used for things like CF memory expansion cards & stuff like that.....

Ye anciente Dell lappie has an external PCMCIA slot, sitting directly below the hard drive 'caddy', more commonly known as a CardBus slot. I use this for a 'period' NetGear wireless adapter that's around the same vintage as the hardware itself, since the Dell has just 2 USB ports & no built-in wireless. Occasionally, I'll plug a four-port USB 2.0 CardBus adapter into it, and use a NetGear USB dongle instead, if I'm going to want to use several USB gadgets at the same time.....

I've never bothered looking for USB 3.0 (I know they ARE available) despite using a USB 3.0 external HDD with it. A USB 3.0 device will still run faster through a USB 2.0 port than a native USB 2.0 device will (for some strange reason).

As for "being for Windows platform", that's rubbish. If the kernel supports PCMCIA/ExpressCard (most do; the CardBus standard is a pretty old one), AND USB 3.0, you're laughing.

--------------------------------

Turns out USB 3.0 adapters are available in Expresscard, but NOT CardBus.....due to CardBus having lower bandwidth limitations. So that's something I've learnt today.


Mike.

[gychang]

Hi, Greg.

Now; when you say "Express card slot", what are you actually referring to?

--------------------------------

Turns out USB 3.0 adapters are available in Expresscard, but NOT CardBus.....due to CardBus having lower bandwidth limitations. So that's something I've learnt today.


Mike.

Here is a picture of what I am referring to.

unnamed.png (106.7 KiB) Viewed 564 times

[mikewalsh]

@gychang :-

Mm. Looks like a Dell of some description. A Dimension, or one of the 'business-class' Latitudes..?

From the piccie, that does look like ExpressCard rather than CardBus. The slot's a bit too deep for CardBus, which had slimmer measurements....

Well, research shows that USB 3.0 is more commonly available in ExpressCard. One of the best firms I've found for this kind of thing are these guys:-

https://www.synchrotech.com/

They have a huge range of these cards, in all the different permutations that PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard went through over the years. If they can't supply what you want, they'll hunt around and find it for you; their customer service is that good. Do be aware, however, that adding USB 3.0 support via one of these cards is NOT exactly cheap.....

https://www.synchrotech.com/products-ex ... er_01.html

What does the other slot on that side do? What is it for?


Mike.

[gychang]

@gychang :-

Mm. Looks like a Dell of some description. A Dimension, or one of the 'business-class' Latitudes..?

From the piccie, that does look like ExpressCard rather than CardBus. The slot's a bit too deep for CardBus, which had slimmer measurements....

Well, research shows that USB 3.0 is more commonly available in ExpressCard. One of the best firms I've found for this kind of thing are these guys:-

https://www.synchrotech.com/

They have a huge range of these cards, in all the different permutations that PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard went through over the years. If they can't supply what you want, they'll hunt around and find it for you; their customer service is that good. Do be aware, however, that adding USB 3.0 support via one of these cards is NOT exactly cheap.....

https://www.synchrotech.com/products-ex ... er_01.html

What does the other slot on that side do? What is it for?


Mike.

Not sure what the other slot is for, wonder if anyone actually using it on Puppy???

[greengeek]

Anyone have experience with puppy and any working USB 3.0 cards?

Hi gychang - i have learnt a lot from this thread. I had ordered an Express Card USB3 adapter online many months ago and did not receive what i was expecting.

I was expecting to receive a skinny card that would fit inside a netbook but now i realise i must have been confusing Expresscard with PCI-e.

What i received looked a bit like a PCMCIA (Cardbus) card but did not fit any of my old PCMCIA slots so i shelved it.

Now that i see the picture you posted i realise that an Express card slot can look just like PCMCIA. Except it seems ExpressCard comes in two widths - 34mm and 54mm. I think the slot you have labelled in that image must actually be a 54mm - not 34mm.

Anyway, here is the adapter that i have had for months but never used:
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01ExpressCard01.jpg (44.51 KiB) Viewed 519 times

02ExpressCard02.jpg (64.55 KiB) Viewed 519 times

[greengeek]

I looked through my old laptops and found a Toshiba A100 that does in fact have a combined PCMCIA and ExpressCard slot. I had previously thought that it was just a standard double height dual PCMCIA slot but you can actually see a small moulded label saying "EX" next to the top slot and "CB" next to the bottom slot.

Awesome! Surprise surprise!
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03DualSlot01.jpg (103.71 KiB) Viewed 518 times

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04DualSlot04.jpg (55.15 KiB) Viewed 518 times

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Anyway i did some tests using Radky's Dpup Sretch 7.5 as that has kernel 4.1.48 and i figured that should be new enough to recognise the adapter and sure enough it does!

Here is a pic of the adapter in place, with a USB3 stick inserted.
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05USBandAdapter.jpg (37.87 KiB) Viewed 518 times

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Here are my notes:

- The adapter must already be plugged in before booting. Does not seem to be hot swappable.
- Take care to keep pressure on the adapter when removing usb sticks from the adapter or else the adapter will pull out of the slot before the stick pulls out of the adapter. Then you would have to reboot to reset the adapter.
- I found that data transfer was approximately twice as fast going through the USB3 adapter as it was through my other usb ports. Nice gain of speed!
- Interestingly enough i discovered that the data transfer to a FAT32 partition was twice as fast as transfer to an EXT2 partition. (so that's a minimum 4x gain). Nice to know.

- other sticks or other types of data transfer may be even faster. The packet blurb says up to 10x faster than USB2.
Bear in mind that Linux drivers never give the same maximum speed as Windows drivers (in my experience anyway).

Now there is one bit of information that i am really pleased to have discovered during my testing - although it may be irrelevant to anyone else.
- If the USB3 stick inserted into the adapter is formatted as Linux-Swap then the system will detect it during boot and will be able to use it as swap. I did not really expect this to work because many PCMCIA style storage adapters cannot be used in this way (just as SD adapters cannot be detected as swap pre-Boot).

Why is this valuable?
- because it means that a low RAM PC can have a fast swap partition added via USB3. (especially useful if you do not have an internal HDD or do not want to re-partition an internal HDD)

But wait there's more!
- When booting a puppy from CD the system will create a "personal storage space" that matches the size of the PC RAM.
In a PC with very little RAM this can be quite limiting until you create an expandable personal storage file somewhere on disk.
However - many of us never create personal storage files (or folders) because of various risks of corruption or retention of malware etc.
This is where the USB3 swap can be very useful - If the adapter and usb stick are plugged in before you boot then Puppy will add the size of the swap partition ONTO the RAM total - giving a massive personal storage space!

In the case of my 1GB Toshiba Satellite A100 the additional swap partition took it from a relatively unuseable PC to one that is now very useable! I can do massive copies of big files, and also video processing or large iso remastering without running out of personal storage space.

(What i learnt from this process is that USB swap can be quite useful if "swapped on" during normal running (although this extra swap space will NOT be added to the personal storage space unless plugged in BEFORE BOOT) - but can be way more useful if plugged in before booting. The fact that "personal storage space" can be hugely increased by booting with USB3 swap is great news for me. This info will solve some issues i have previously noted in my systems. Yay!)

So all in all it looks as if a USB3 express card can be very useful.

Thanks!

[mikewalsh]

@greengeek :-

Hiya, GG.

It's hardly surprising they're not hot-swappable. They're connected to the PCI bus, internally. Ever heard of anyone trying to "hot-swap" a graphics card while the machine's powered up? Or a network, or RAID card?

Same thing with these.

It also explains why you can create a decent-sized swap partition with 'em as well. Again, as with the 'normal' drives in your system, because everything's connected via the PCI sub-system, that's WHY a swap partition on a stick plugged into one of these cards will get detected. Same as a swap partition on an internal drive being detected, 'cos that's how the system is seeing the stick.....as an 'internal' drive.

Nicely detailed images, BTW. That's the first time I've ever seen a "double-decker" effect like that..!

(As for kernels, well.....it's a bit of a non-issue, TBH. The original PCMCIA card spec was developed back at the start of the final decade of the 20th century, before Linux even existed. Even the ExpressCard standard showed up circa 2003.....

They've been supported by the Linux kernel virtually since day one..!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card


Mike.

[Jafadmin]

I have one of these cheapy ones that works great on my thinkpad T420
https://www.amazon.com/Express-ExpressC ... 440&sr=8-7

[bark-woof-fetch]

Tried two of the cheap ones and spent a futile night with one trying everything I could find in BIOS and driver installs. So no go so far. For some of the retro laptop series it can be a killer feature for frugal and persistent live OS usage where the next gen models with USB3 are easily 2-3 x higher priced on refurb and used market.

Mine is a HP elitebook with a eSATA port on the docking station which speedwise is inbetween USB2 and local HDD but of course not half as handy as a expresscard slot.