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PowerBook PC Card and USB 3.0

L

longwood

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 10, 2005
170
0
So I am looking at getting an external hard drive for my PowerBook and I started thinking about USB 3. I looked around and saw that there is an ExpressCard that will connect with external USB 3 drives, however, being a PowerBook I'm limited to the PC Card Type I or II. So then I started looking for PC Card to ExpressCard adapters and did find a few.

So the question is, can I run PC Card to ExpressCard to USB 3 and still reap the benefits of USB 3?
 
you can try , cant see a benefit of that , it would be cheaper and more cost effective to get a external firewire harddrive

and with the pc card you are limited to the speed of CardBus while firwire offers you a 400mbit/s //800mb/s speed
usb peaks at 480mb/s but never can keep that speed so the average is far less then the 400mbit/s of firewire
http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm

so no i would simply buy a firewire drive it offers more speed then usb 2.0


i make it easier to understand i could connect a usb2.0 drive to my iMac g3 's usb 1.1 port , it would work but i would still be limited to usb 1.1 speed so doesn't make sense does it ?
 
Last edited:
longwood said:
So I am looking at getting an external hard drive for my PowerBook and I started thinking about USB 3. I looked around and saw that there is an ExpressCard that will connect with external USB 3 drives, however, being a PowerBook I'm limited to the PC Card Type I or II. So then I started looking for PC Card to ExpressCard adapters and did find a few.

So the question is, can I run PC Card to ExpressCard to USB 3 and still reap the benefits of USB 3?
Click to expand...

i'd think there's a good possibility of problems with a lack of driver support - so i'd definately confirm that before spending out
 
Id definitely go with a FW800 drive (Much better than USB 3.0 - I mean my system has 4 FW 800 ports, and I dont wish any of them had been replaced by USB3.0 as I dont see the point yet - no drivers really for Mac, and not even internal cards for the latest and greatest yet)
 
I would go with FW800. I'm pretty sure your PB should have one and the 800 mb/s transfer speed should be more than sufficient for an external drive.
 
Yeah it has FW 400 and 800 ports, but I was hoping that I would be able to use the PC Card too.

Thanks MacHamster68 for the analogy. I didn't know the speed of the PC Card so didn't know exactly how everything would work.
 
AFAIK No one makes a PCMCIA USB 3.0 card that will work with a Mac. The only options out there for Mac compatible USB 3.0 are PCI express and Express Card.


NVM: Didn't see that you wanted to use an expresscard adapter. But either way, it's not really going to benefit you.
 
If there is no point in using it to connect a USB 3 drive, what would be some other possible uses for the PC card slot?
 
longwood said:
If there is no point in using it to connect a USB 3 drive, what would be some other possible uses for the PC card slot?
Click to expand...

I have seen some that are card readers for SD cards an such if your into that kind of stuff.
 
pc cards are out of fashion since you get everything as usb device and cheaper now
but you could put in a compact flash drive for a bit extra storage "inside" to make use of the slot (dont know how big the biggest is you can get ,but i know you could get them up to 32Gb and they dont stick out ;)
 
MacHamster68 said:
pc cards are out of fashion since you get everything as usb device and cheaper now
but you could put in a compact flash drive for a bit extra storage "inside" to make use of the slot (dont know how big the biggest is you can get ,but i know you could get them up to 32Gb and they dont stick out ;)
Click to expand...

Oh, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. I'll take a look around and see what's out there.
 
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