SilverStone EC03 USB 3.0 PCI-E Adapter

Included inside the product box was the PCI-E x1 expansion card, the 3.5-inch I/O bay, mounting screws, a mini driver CD, a small product manual, and the USB 3.0 internal connector to dual USB 3.0 ports. The EC03 was sent over by SilverStone Technology as a Phoronix review sample.

When installing the SilverStone EC03 PCI Express expansion card into one of the Phoronix test systems running Ubuntu 11.10, the USB 3.0 controller was working fine right from the start. There was not any worrying about drivers or anything else while testing with the Linux 3.0 and Linux 3.2 development kernels.

For seeing how well this USB3 card works, its performance was compared by measuring the transfer speeds of the USB 3.0 ports found on the ASRock Z68 Pro3 motherboard and then again when using the SST-EC03. The SilverStone Raven RVS02 was used with the 240GB OCZ Agility 3 (Serial ATA 3.0) SSD as the test candidate. The Linux 3.2 x86_64 kernel with Ubuntu 11.10 was the software stack for running these Linux USB3 benchmarks.