4-port Usb Audio Card For Mac

I would not recommend the Inateck KT4006 card - it seems to have a problem when the system spins down a drive due to not being used for a while. Then get an error about the drive not correctly dismounted. Have had no drive corruptions issues yet, but still this is not a good message to get on your Time Machine backup disk.

One thing to double check on any USB 3 PCI card is what version of OS X it supports. Adobe acrobat reder for mac. Have seen some that only work on pre-Yosemite and some that only work Yosemite and newer, so do a bit of research on which ever one you are thinking about.

One note, the very expensive USB 3 cards tend to be more higher performance as they have independent clocks for each port, rather than one clock for all ports. The net result is that the better cards with multiple clocks can run all ports at the full USB 3 speed and the cards that share a clock are limited to sharing that available bandwidth across all ports. So imagine 4 USB 3 drives running at 5Gbps or 4 USB 3 drives sharing one 5 Gbps connection. Depending on your application can be a big difference. Historically most USB3 cards even generic cheap PC ones worked fine in a classic Mac Pro with no drivers, however from Yosemite onwards and especially so for El Capitan more of these cheap generic cards have had issues.

The Inateck one on their own website specifically says it is not compatible with Yosemite or later. See Despite the above official warning a lot of people have used it with no issues, I have seen some suggestions that it might be affected by being put in certain slots.

The card is an a Rosewill 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Card model RC-508, chipset: Renesas uPD720201, run-in High Sierra on a 2010 Mac Pro tower. An external sound card offers an easy path to upgrading the sound quality of your favorite laptop or desktop computer, especially if it's an affordable or mid-range model. The gadgets are easy to set up, and they connect to the computer via a USB port.

I personally wanted to avoid any possibility of such issues and therefore bought a SonnetTech card which specifically states it is compatible with Yosemite, El Capitan and Sierra. SonnetTech have two versions of their USB3 card, one with a shared bus for all four ports, and a more expensive one with four separate buses one per port with this therefore being able to run all four ports simultaneously at full speed. (As per the comment by dot.com) All I repeat all USB3 cards have issues with external hard drives when the Mac wakes from sleep, in fact even built-in USB ports have such issues so I would not worry too much about this since there is nothing you can do about it. As you only mention using a USB audio interface this will not be applicable anyway.

Therefore you can get either a card or a card both of which have full Mac compatibility or risk a cheaper generic card. What is the basis for your statement about 'all USB3 cards have issues with external hard drives when the Mac wakes from sleep' (personal experience or research or articles or???)? Perhaps you could refer to some place that might explain this problem further and it's cause?

This Inateck KT4006 does show this behavior by the way on both spinning type disks as well as memory thumb drives (so my previous comment about Inateck Kt4006 not doing this was incorrect). I don't know why I didn't notice this before, but it just happened a bit ago after I reseated the KT4006 into a different PCI slot to see if it still gets the incorrectly unmounted drive message and did some sleep tests, and so far it hasn't done it except for when waking the system after it had been put to sleep first (I moved KT4006 from slot 4 to slot 3). But in addition, my issue cause is unknown for now, but am leaning to something to do with when the OS (Yosemite in my case), spins down a drive when it hasn't been used in a while, which results in the same sort of 'drive not correctly dismounted' error notification message that pops up on screen. Any idea how to 'tune' this parameter that spins down drives after some period of inactivity so I can test for sure? I know where to turn it off/on in Energy Saver System Preferences. Apple Footer • This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.

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