Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe Card
Add SuperSpeed USB Connections to Your Mac Pro or Desktop PC
Your computer has USB 2.0 ports, and they’ve served you well. Talk about compatibility—keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, joysticks, digital cameras, flash drives—what couldn’t you plug in? Talk about performance—well, that’s where USB ports 2.0 are merely passable—they limit data transfer speeds to around 25–30 MB/s. For most peripherals, that’s perfectly adequate, but when you connect an external drive and expect great performance, that bottleneck is a problem—video editing, backing up, and other data-intensive activities suffer as a result. Enter Sonnet’s Allegro™ USB 3.0 PCIe, the bottleneck breaker! This Sonnet host controller is based on the new USB 3.0 standard that offers up to 10x the performance of the decade-old USB 2.0 interface. A single hard drive with a USB 3.0 interface is capable of transferring data at up to 125 MB/s, while SSDs (solid state drives) are capable of even faster transfers—install an Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe card into your computer to exploit the full performance potential of these fast drives.
Sonnet’s Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe features a PCIe 2.0 bus interface to take advantage of your computer’s fast expansion card slots. Each of this card’s ports supports bus-powered peripherals (devices that work without a separate power supply, including some external drives and scanners). Not only is this card backward-compatible with your USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 peripherals, it also supports hot-swappable device connection. Install an Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe card into your computer to experience the super speed of USB 3.0 connectivity firsthand.
Key Features
Simple way to add two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports to a Mac Pro or desktop PC with PCI Express 2.0 slots
Transfers data up to 10x faster than over USB 2.0 connections
Supports hot-swappable device connection—plug in and disconnect peripherals without shutting off your computer
Powered ports support bus-powered drives
Mac Compatibility
Mac Pro
Mac OS® X Version 10.6+
Mac OS X Lion compatible
PC Compatibility
PC (with PCI Express slots; PCI Express 2.0 slots recommended)
Windows® 7
Windows Vista®
Windows XP
Technical Notes
1.The Mac OS X driver for this card supports USB 3.0 hard drives and Sonnet Dio Pro Media Reader, but not other USB peripherals or hubs.
2.USB 3.0 devices require USB 3.0 cables to support USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed) transfer speeds (up to 5 Gb/s). Use of USB 2.0 cables between USB 3.0 devices and Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe is supported, but data transfers are limited to USB 2.0 speeds (up to 480 Mb/s).
Specifications subject to change without notice.
