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SIIG USB 3.0 Card & Bay Hub Kit Review

Reviewed by: Anthony Garland
Reviewed on: October 19th, 2010 While USB 3.0 is certainly starting to garner more and more attention from motherboard manufacturers, and consumers in general, one thing still remains an issue with USB 3.0: lack of front SuperSpeed ports on cases. What is worse, the handful of cases that DO have front USB 3.0 ports, don't have internal USB 3.0 headers and rather rely on extremal connectors; meaning you need to snake a cable out and around back of the case. This is not a good thing. SIIG understands the need for front mounted ports and has created a very interesting combination kit, that is a PCI Express x1 USB 3.0 adapter and a front SuperSpeed USB 4-port hub 3.5" / 5.25" bay adapter. This combination means you can get all the benefits of USB 3.0 without needing to reach around the back of your case to use it. Read on for my full review.

Getting USB 3.0 Kit Ready
As you can see, this combination kit consists of two separate but equally important components. The first is a fairly typical looking, NEC / Renesas-based PCI-E x1 interface SuperSpeed USB adapter card, just one which uses a fairly non-standard SATA power port for additional power input rather than a MOLEX connector. While the power interface is different, what really makes this card special is the addition of an internal USB 3.0 header port; albeit it still is a "external" style port and not a true internal port. This means that you can use any USB 3.0 cable you own to connect to front USB 3.0 port(s), but as time goes by its usefulness will diminish. Of course, as time goes by motherboard and cases will start coming with "proper" internal USB 3.0 headers and front panel connectivity options so this niche will disappear. In the mean time, this small card is one special USB 3.0 adapter card that makes it very impressive.

Though without the other half of this combination 2-in-1 kit, the USB 3.0 PCI-E adapter card by itself, is not all that useful and this is where the other half comes into play. Much like the SIIG external 4 port USB 3.0 hub I recently looked at, the 4 port 3.5"/5.25" bay hub uses a single USB 3.0 port and turns it into FOUR via its use of a single VIL810 controller chip. Since the PCI Express card which makes up the other half of this combination kit has an internal USB 3.0 port, this means you do not have to snake a cable outside your case to get four front mounted SuperSpeed USB ports.

The other nice thing about this hub is that it is in fact a 3.5" bay hub that comes with a 5.25" bay adapter. What this means is you can use it in either a free "floppy drive" bay on your case OR a 5.25" bay! This makes this hub VERY flexible and very easy to install. Also nice to see, is much like the SIIG external hub I looked at awhile back, this bad boy is powered a hub. Unlike the external one though this one can either be powered by a MOLEX or SATA port cable so no power brick is needed, just don't plug in both the SATA and MOLEX or bad things will happen. I like this added flexibility as sometimes a MOLEX cable is easier to free up than SATA and in other builds the opposite is true.

To be honest the only three issues I have with combination kit are is the x1 PCI-E interface, only one internal port and the plastic 5.25" bay adapter. I dislike x1 adapter cards as they do limit the speed of what you can get out of the two ports, but in all likely hood this is a non-issue as the four front ports are what you will be using most of the time and they all share one USB 3.0 port bandwidth.

The last issue, the asking price, is eyebrow raising especially when you consider the fact that the front 5.25" bay adapter is made from plastic. I am not a fond lover of plastic bay adapters, and to be blunt, for the asking price SIIG really should have gone with a much more durable metal one. By themselves these issues are not deal breakers and some may not even apply to your situation but all three are issues you need to be aware of before purchasing this $100 kit.

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