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. My computer has three USB 2.0 ports and an empty ExpressCard slot (thank you Apple!). So with this Startech<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n You can use any expresscard\/34 USB 3.0 adapter that has the \u00c2\u00b5PD720200 or \u00c2\u00b5PD720202 (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. There are some Mac-specific cards too, but the hardware is identical and you pay extra for the privilege.<\/p>\n 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. 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.<\/p>\n The problem is, there are no native Mac drivers for these generic cards. Previously the best workaround was to create a USB boot disk loaded with FreeDOS and some utilities to re-flash the card with a vendor and device ID that made it look like one of the Mac-specific cards, and then use the driver for that Mac-specific card. This is perfectly fine, and may actually be preferable if you can get it to work. The thing is, building a bootable USB disk in Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks for FreeDOS was next to impossible (at least for me).<\/p>\nWhere to get them:<\/h4>\n
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The problem…<\/h4>\n
Instructions for installing generic drivers for generic USB 3.0 adapters on Mac OS X<\/h4>\n