MC wrote:The perfomance gain from 3.0 to 3.1 is - in real-world sitations and with existing hardware - near zero. Therefore I would still recommend the Sonnet 4 port card instead, unless you have a specific need for a USB-C port.
Still this is a nice find, thanks for testing and sharing.
You're welcome Matthias
Maybe one remark to your statement about the performance gain and that USB 3.1 gives you no real benefits.
I think this you mean this for recording interfaces only ?!
In my own measurings I already noticed, that the RTT time differencies become smaller and smaller.
An upgrade to even higher BW is surely only adviced, if you need to transfer even more channels than the UFX+ can handle.
But as these are already a lot of channels, this will surely take some time ;-)
But what I wanted to point out is ....
In the last month we read news about all these encryption trojans. So the demand for an external backup becomes higher and higher.
IMHO these USB3.1 Gen2 interfaces are really a present from industry as they offer high speed data transfer to a real affordable. USB3.1 Gen2 offers (theoretically) the same speed like 10 Gigabit network interfaces to a fraction of the price. You pay between €32-40 for an USB3.1 card.
In contrast to that every other higher than 1 Gbps speed solution (LAN), be it based on Link aggregation (2x Gigabit) or 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Thunderbolt, NAS, etc ... has a much higher price tag and often additional requirements that you need to meet (i.e. LACP, etc...). Channel bundeling might even not be available for one PC because of 1Gbe Interface only or lack of LACP in the driver.
StarTech offer these USB3.1 cards and has also i.e a 1 drive external case for USB3.1/eSata. Together around €100.
With this you can build a very nice high speed external backup solution (plus the costs of the disk of course).
I backup with an internal disk so that backup can run automated. And on top I have this external drive, where its very handy that there is an on/off switch in the back of the drive enclosure. So that its fully isolated and your data can not be encrypted by a trojan.
So .. if you need to upgrade your PC, because your usual USB2 or USB3 ports are causing a problem, then I would take such a high speed USB 3.1 Gen2 interface for more flexibility (if it is supported by the recording interface).
Especially because the PCIe socket resources on your mainboard might be "limited".
You need to look for x4-PCIe sockets and this can be a challenge on consumer mainboards:
Some do not have these. Some have them shared with other components on the board like M.2.
Or you need to take a x8 or x16 socket. If taking a x16 socket you need to make sure, that your GPU doesnt run of all sudden than with half bandwidth (x8 instead of x16).
So if such an upgrade is due, then better only one time for such an high speed interface than maybe for a 4xFresco Chip card which also needs a PCIe socket with 4 lines. Of course if you have multiple recording interfaces, like ie 2 UFX+ and ADI-2 Pro then having such a 4xUSB3 cards with 4 Fresco Chips on it might be required.
So it would be nice to find out whether these newer ASMedia chips are also compatible to other RME USB3 or USB2
recording interfaces to find out, whether its feasible to also have a high speed interface for quicker backup and restore.
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14