How To Make Your Laptop USB3 Compatible

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• published: 07 Jul 2012
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It is fairly easy to upgrade your laptop to the latest USB3 and eSATA technology using PCI-based expresscards found on many older laptops. In this video, Mike Fara from http://windows7forums.com shows you how it is done. We go through some benchmarks and the process of backing up the laptop using Acronis True Image 12 and a 128GB Patriot USB3 flash drive. In this video, I will show you how to make your laptop USB3 compatible, even if your laptop did not come with USB3 ports. The key to making this change is simply to use an express card in order to benefit from the new speed of USB3. The throughput and bandwidth capabilities of USB3 far exceed it's predecessor USB2. If you have a laptop that does not have a Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge motherboard, chances are you are using USB2. The maximum write speed is about 20MB/s. To contrast that, the average write speed of a USB3 flash drive is about 120MB/s, with a maximum throughput of 5GBit/s. I'll be demonstrating the USB flash drive for you right now. As you can see we have a M1330 laptop. This laptop was originally designed for compatibility for Windows Vista. However, it has seen numerous upgrades, including an upgrade to its network card, an upgrade to its memory, and an upgrade to its hard drive from a standard conventional hard drive to a solid state drive. Like many laptops of the Windows Vista generation, it is only capable of using USB2, however this is solved by using USB3 express card. The equivalent to a laptop PCI express card would be an internal PCI card installed on a desktop computer. These cards are often used specifically as graphics cards, network cards, wireless Internet cards, as well as Bluetooth cards, and anything you can possibly think of that would improve the functionality of your desktop computer. For example, you can install an internal PCI card to give you USB3 capability on a desktop computer as well. This, quite obviously, is a USB3 express card. It has a 5Gbit/s transfer rate, and it can be used, quite easily, by sliding it in to any basic laptop that still has express card ports. Typically, these do not have USB3 or eSATA capability. This is also an eSATA express card. These would be used for external serial ATA, which is a little bit faster, but usually requires an external power source. USB3 devices currently do not really require multiple power sources because they are powered by the USB hub. You will go ahead and find the express card. It is usually on the side of the system. We install the card carefully, sliding it in, and you see it light up right there. We have two ports for this card, and you'll see it pop up in Windows. You may have to install drivers that come with the device, but in this case we already them installed. And of course, you can go ahead and eject that device any time you want. It is installed and working properly in Microsoft Windows 7. We will go ahead and now install our USB3 flash drive into this USB3 device. Once we do that we will have an excellent connection going into this system going at USB3 speed. As you can see, we got pretty good benchmarks there, going at about 120MB/s. Launching Acronis True Image Home 12 shows us that the backup speed is going very fast. This is doing an incremental backup of the M1330, but a full backup was even made that took up to about 15-20 minutes. Traditionally, this takes a lot longer for a 128GB drive, but what you are seeing here is about 5GB of data backed up in less than approximately 3 minutes. I certainly hope that you enjoyed watching this video. The USB3 flash drive can actually be used for multiple purposes. This includes the installation of operating systems, the execution of files that would normally be placed on a regular hard drive, and all sorts of different arrangements. You can use your USB3 flash drive as if it is an internal drive on your system. That's how fast it is. These drives are pretty reliable; they are much more reliable than conventional hard drives. And you will find that using them is pretty easy. I hope you will join us on Windows7Forums.com. Thanks a lot.