Allegro Pro 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type A PCIe Card (USB3-PRO-4P10-E)
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IDArticle TitlePost Date
756 Do the Sonnet USB 2.0 or USB 3 cards support the Apple SuperDrive?Apr-02-22
759 My bus-powered USB 3 drive or SSD will not reliably mount or transfer data.Dec-14-19
817 Storage connected to a USB 3 PCIe card (or Tango combo card) gives an macOS error message upon wake from sleep.May-12-20
To minimize power usage during sleep, power is removed from PCIe cards. Because of this power-saving specification, a USB 3 PCIe card is unable to maintain USB port power during sleep. In macOS, this result in a storage device disconnect upon wake from sleep. The storage device will automatically remount, but the system reports a disconnect message. Because macOS flushes all caches before sleeping, this disconnect should never result in any loss of data.
 
933 What versions of macOS support Allegro USB 3 cards?Apr-02-22
956 What generations of Thunderbolt chassis do Sonnet Allegro PCIe cards support?Apr-02-22
971 One or more of my ports has stopped working on my USB 3 card.Aug-24-22
1080 What is the difference between USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2?Apr-02-22
1099 What makes Sonnet USB 3.2 Cards more reliable than other USB 3 cards?Apr-02-22
1144 Why does Sonnet use only PCIe 2 to connect the two controllers on these 4-port USB 3.2 Gen 2 cards?Apr-18-21
We connect each USB 3 controller with two lanes of PCIe 2. Each controller has 1000MB/s bandwidth which is enough bandwidth for the fastest devices you can connect, such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 NVMe SSDs. Because the read/write bandwidth is independent, on one controller you can be reading from one SSD at 1000MB/s, and writing to another at 1000MB/s, plus the same on the 2nd controller for an aggregate transfer rate of 4000MB/s. What makes this possible is that Sonnet uses the advanced ASMedia 3142 Controller that supports Multiple INs, which means that reads can commence on one port before a write has competed on the other port.

A PCIe 3 Bridge chip would cost you $50 more, but would give you incremental performance only if you needed to continually simultaneously read--or simultaneously write--to four USB 3.1 Gen 2 NVMe devices, a very unusual use case.

 
1149 How to configure Linux to use Allegro Pro USB card models USB3C-4PM-E and USB3-PRO-4P10-EMay-04-21
1168 If I put a usb 2.0 and 3.0 device on the same controller will the speeds for the 3.0 device drop to 2.0 like older split-port controllers?Dec-07-21
The Sonnet Allegro USB-C and Allegro Pro 4-port Type A USB 3.2 cards support the fastest speed of each device independently on each port. The Sonnet cards supports "Multiple Ins", which means that that the host can issue a read request to one endpoint device and then proceed with other transactions without waiting for the response from the first device. Supporting Multiple Ins also improves performance to mutiple Gen 1 devices on a downstream Gen 2 hub connected to a Sonnet card Gen 2 port.