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Making NEC USB 3.0 Card Fully Comportable with Original MAC Drivers [CalDigit, LaCie, Oyen]

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OK, so I might have been a bit hasty with my benchmarks last time.

Just pulled the adapter from the drawer again to try it out. This time in an early-2011 17" MBP with a 1TB Corsair MX500 SSD. I tried the same "time cp" -routine with a ~5GB Windows XP VirtualBox image file as previously, but with two different USB sticks this time.

First USB stick in question is a Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 USB 3.0 32GB, which, admittedly is not the newest nor the fastest USB3.0 stick out there, but it is still fast enough to showcase the differences between the USB2.0 and 3.0 ports.


Firstly, with the USB 3.0 card:

Code: 
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp Windows\ XP.vdi /Volumes/32GB_Kingston/tempfile

real    6m49.809s
user    0m0.028s
sys    0m5.477s
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp /Volumes/32GB_Kingston/tempfile ./tempfile

real    0m54.006s
user    0m0.013s
sys    0m3.464s

And then with the native USB 2.0 ports:

Code: 
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp Windows\ XP.vdi /Volumes/32GB_Kingston/tempfile

real    10m15.342s
user    0m0.020s
sys    0m5.718s
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp /Volumes/32GB_Kingston/tempfile ./tempfile

real    2m58.111s
user    0m0.017s
sys    0m5.226s




Moving on to a newer ADATA UV150 USB 3.1 64GB stick. Again, with the USB 3.0 card:

Code: 
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp Windows\ XP.vdi /Volumes/64gb/tempfile

real    5m19.723s
user    0m0.028s
sys    0m4.842s

Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp /Volumes/64gb/tempfile ./tempfile

real    0m46.041s
user    0m0.014s
sys    0m3.855s


And again with the USB 2.0 port:

Code: 
Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp Windows\ XP.vdi /Volumes/64gb/tempfile

real    5m40.212s
user    0m0.021s
sys    0m5.657s

Juha-Mattis-MacBook-Pro:Windows XP juha-matti$ time cp /Volumes/64gb/tempfile ./tempfile

real    2m35.762s
user    0m0.016s
sys    0m5.302s



So, in conclusion, a noticeable improvement with the NEC USB card. I've understood that the write speeds on memory sticks are not great in general, so I'm not blaming the card for the rather poor speeds when compared to the read numbers.
 
FYI trying to use this driver on a MacBook 17 using an expresscard adapter running Catalina (10.15.2):
github.com

Releases · chris1111/USB-3.0-NEC

Visit BLOG : https://com-chris1111.github.io. Contribute to chris1111/USB-3.0-NEC development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

it's just horribly horribly SLOOOOOOOW to the point it takes probably over an hour to mount a flash drive and 3-5 seconds per record to list a directory using ls:


➜ ~ date ; ls /Volumes/NO\ NAME/usr | wc -l; date
Sat Dec 28 16:19:36 MST 2019
6
Sat Dec 28 16:20:04 MST 2019
(28 seconds; 4.67 per record)

Much longer when there are more contents, it seems:

➜ ~ date ; ls /Volumes/NO\ NAME/usr/lib | wc -l; date
Sat Dec 28 16:20:19 MST 2019
123
Sat Dec 28 16:28:24 MST 2019
(8 minutes 5 seconds or 488 seconds; 3.97 per record)

ls cannot be interrupted while its running.

System Info. labels the port as a 3.0 port but it runs slower than a 1.0. Less than useless.

If anyone has a driver they think would work better in Catalina please let me know.
 
I removed that driver and tried the generic one (which is how I got it to work in Yosemite way back in 2015):
https://sourceforge.net/projects/genericusbxhci/
I got the same symptoms so I took a peek in ioreg and it seems the device is attached to com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCIPCI which I don't think is correct.

Edit:
Apple's driver matches the device:
from: /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBHostFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBXHCIPCI.kext/Contents/Info.plist

<key>AppleUSBXHCIPCI</key>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBXHCIPCI</string>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>AppleUSBXHCIPCI</string>
<key>IOPCIClassMatch</key>
<string>0x0c033000</string>
<key>IOPCIPauseCompatible</key>
<true/>
<key>IOPCITunnelCompatible</key>
<true/>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOPCIDevice</string>
</dict>

Edit2: kextutil is complaining about file permissions which I curiously cannot fix. I've set the owner to root:wheel and tried chown 755 and 700 to no avail:
Code: 
    File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other):

Edit3: OK, I got some psudeo-success after some tinkering.

I used the Hackintool.app guide mentioned here:
www.tonymacx86.com

[GUIDE] Installing 3rd Party Kexts - El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina

Installing 3rd Party Kexts in /Library/Extensions Note: This guide was originally written to support MacOS Mojave and older versions (< r5200) of the Clover boot-loader. The methods detailed here are now considered legacy methods and should only used with older versions of MacOS as detailed...
www.tonymacx86.com www.tonymacx86.com
to install the kext mentioned at the top of this post

This alone DOES NOT WORK unless you:
Code: 
kextload /Library/Extensions/GenericUSBXHCI.kext

Now the correct driver loads and it appears to run well.

In the future I would like to figure out how to load the driver automatically as well as create an exception in Gatekeeper so I don't have to disable the whole thing.
 
Last edited:
if anyone can confirm that Acer TimelineX 4820T can work with Renesas uPD720202 chips? I'm a linux user (Ubuntu) and wanna buy a pcie card like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32831005411.html

Selection_999(1455).png


just wondering if the hardware is compatible out of the box or there is something to do with BIOS/etc to enable it?
 
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