Fixing the AKE BC398 USB3.0 sluggish performance

Recently I've got myself a ExpressCard USB 3.0 controller (AKE BC398 USB3.0 Card) from ebay for my almost 5 years old Lenovo T400 (amazing machine, it seem to last forever).

AKE BC398 ExpressCard

The card only cost me around USD $12 from ebay. Installing the card was a piece of cake; just eject the plastic piece from the ExpressCard slot and slot the card in; it fit nicely. It is a 54mm type.

1st think I tried after installing the hardware is plug my USB 3 portable hard drive (Seagate FreeAgent) in and copy a large file (a openSUSE iso file ~4.5GB) to the computer's desktop. To my surprise, the speed was slow, I mean snail slow! Even slower then my USB 2 port ~ 10 MB/s. I unplug the portable drive and plug the drive to my USB 2.0 port and it has ~30MB/s speed, copying the same file.

After trying with several trick, plug or unplug, give it an external power, driver updates, and even reformat my Seagate FreeAgent drive, but nothing seem to work. I turn to Google, and found out there are people having the same problem and firmware update seem to fix this. So I go ahead and do that.

Following are steps to update the AKE BC398 ExpressCard's firmware.
  1. The AKE BC398 has a ASMEDIA chip set, so I download the latest firmware from http://www.station-drivers.com/page/asmedia.htm (Version 120816-02-02-06D)
  2.  Also download the latest driver for windows. (I'm using Driver Asmedia_usb3_1.16.2.0)
  3. Run the firmware upgrade file as Administrator (Asus USB 3.0 FW Update Tool v2.0.exe)
  4. Run the driver update file as Administrator (Asmedia_usb3_1.16.2.0(www.station-drivers.com).exe)
I perform another round of speed test after the driver and firmware upgrade, and it gives me an average speed of ~70MB/s. Pretty amazing for a $12 upgrade. If you have similar problem with yours., try update your firmware.

Update:
As point out by Antonius Yauw in the comments, there is a variance of AKE BC398 ExpressCard that comes with a NEC/Renesas chipset, if that is the case, you need the NEC/Renesas firmware instead.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 16, 2013 at 4:58 PM

    Just one small issue, not all of these AKE BC398 cards has ASMEDIA chipset, mine had NEC/RENESAS. Correct drivers/firmware for my card is here:http://www.station-drivers.com/page/renesas.htm

    Though I was unable to upgrade the firmware on my card (from 4.0.1.5 to 4.0.2.0)..

    ReplyDelete

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