Inateck Ktu3fr-4p Driver

Update: The replacement card has also disappeared from the PCI bus, both in Windows and when booted into Linux. So much for Inateck / Fresco Logic. I’m extremely disappointed.

In the spirit Technological Masochism (unintentionally!) I recently decided to improve a few things on my old Windows 7 desktop.

Inateck 9-in-1 USB C Hub. 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI-E Card KTU3FR-4P. SuperSpeed USB 3.0: Supports transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps. Fantastic Compatibility: Works great with Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10. No additional drivers are needed for Win8, it has built-in support for the FL1100 chipset. Inateck KTU3FR-5O2U Superspeed 7 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card - 5 USB 3.0 Ports and 2 Rear USB 3.0 Ports Express Card Desktop with 15 Pin SATA Power Connector, Including Two Power Cables 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,197.

I’ve been having USB 3.0 trouble – my motherboard (an Asus P8Z77-V) uses a combination of Intel and ASMedia devices to provide on-board USB 2.0/3.0 services… between the known flakiness of the ASMedia devices and some questionable USB 3.0 cables (and God knows what else) I’d occasionally plug in an external drive and find it suddenly unrecognized (basically the partition table was gone). This wasn’t an isolated situation and it became clear it was probably the controller and/or cables.

I’d been eyeing the Inateck 4-Port USB 3.0 card (model KTU3FR-4P apparently AKA KT4001) as it’s one of the few recommended for an Oculus setup (which… I don’t actually own yet, but it may come in handy when I eventually do), and really one of the few recommended at all. The Fresco Logic FL1100EX controller is supposedly better than the Renesas one some boards have (and way better than the ASMedia one also out there).

Now, you’ll look around and see that there are similar cards by Inateck and others that have more ports – AVOID them if you plan to use this for Oculus. Yes, they have more ports, but they using cascaded controllers and under-perform. (I found a lot of people complaining about the 5 port and 5+2 port version of this card.)

Anyway, I ordered the card, downloaded the latest driver (3.8.33709.0) from the Fresco Logic website (because the included CD will almost always be out of date). I plugged in the card, made sure it had proper power on the SATA connector (important!), powered it up (greed LED = power good apparently), and booted Windows 7.

The system detected the card and installed the same Fresco Logic 3.8.33709.0 driver automatically. It seemed to work fine, tried it with a few drives, no problems.

But I couldn’t just stop there… no, instead I decided (after a thorough backup) that it was high time to try upgrading to Windows 10 Pro. Worst case, it fails and I revert to the backup.

It took quite a while but the upgrade was remarkably painless. I have to say goodbye to my Xilinx ISE (if you want to develop for the Spartan 6 FPGA they now offer the old ISE in a VM), but I didn’t lose anything of importance to me (a couple of things didn’t cooperate… also, Avira has been a royal pain in general in recent weeks, turning off my Firewall for some reason, so I ditched it for now and may just stick with MS Defender).

In the device manager, I had a couple of devices I needed to re-install, but nothing major – uninstall, let it re-detect, or provide the right driver. HOWEVER, I had one unknown device with an warning symbol by it. I uninstalled that and it never returned. I later realized the Inateck card was nowhere to be found.

I’m not sure that’s related – I suspect it was already “dead” by then – but I tried everything. I tried the installer I had not used before – it couldn’t find any Fresco Logic cards at all. I tried booting to a live Ubuntu 18.04 image – lspci didn’t see the card either. Checked the BIOS (it’s UEFI capable but I’m using BIOS + MBR) – no joy. Moved the card to another slot, changed the power connection, boot with it out and boot again with it in – at each step ensuring a hard power off before monkeying with the card. No. Joy.

In retrospect, once it was clear even Ubuntu Live couldn’t see it, it was already toast. I finally pinged Amazon and they cross-shipped me a new card.

Interestingly, in researching this I also found a review on Amazon complaining about virtually the same issue, as well as a post on Reddit with the same problem. I contacted the Redditor to learn what they ended up doing – apparently it came down to uninstalling the drivers (which at this point I had never successfully installed to begin with) and RMA-ing the card. It worked for them at that point.

Sure enough, when the replacement arrived today I installed it, booted up, and Windows immediately saw it and installed the driver. Interestingly it was NOT the same driver Windows 7 installed (which in turn was the Fresco Logic latest driver. Nope, Windows 10 installed Microsoft driver 10.0.17134.1 for this card, and a nervous click of the “update driver” button confirmed it’s the latest one according to MS.

So far the new card seems to work. I thought about trying the old one again but decided not to – I don’t want whatever is wrong with that one leading to the new one failing. Maybe it’s just faulty, but I strongly suspect it’s a persistent configuration of the chip (or some hella big flaw in the old driver that fried the old controller or something).

And FWIW Linux detects the card just fine now, where it was nowhere to be found before.

So, two takeaways:

• If you have Windows 10, DO NOT use any driver for a Fresco Logic-based USB card except whatever Microsoft installs.
• Also, if you are on Windows 7 and are upgrading to Windows 10, it’d be a Really Good Idea to remove the card and uninstall its driver and if possible literally remove the card from the case before doing the upgrade.

Hugo meyer serial numbers list. I suspect there was some really weird interaction during the upgrade process that led to this… but better safe than sorry.

Thus ends this tale of pain and suffering.

I received this product free of charge to review. I tested it with three different operating systems; Windows XP, Vista and Ubuntu Linux 12.04. It came with a drivers CD and molox power to SATA power adapter.

This card is quite small and light weight. I used two different computers. On both machines this card was so short that I could not hook up all my SATA devices at once, because they would not reach this PCI Express card.

However, it is possible that an included molox to SATA power connector might fix this issue. Other than that I have no complaints about this product. I had no problems installing this PCI express card.

On both Windows XP and Vista, installation went flawless. I installed drivers from an included CD and device manager reported a properly installed device. I quickly bench mark tested this card with HD tune.

I used a 16 gigabyte USB 2.0 flash drive to test. On both Windows XP and Vista on average speeds were faster with Inateck’s PCI express card versus an onboard USB port. What really impressed me was that this card worked out of a box on a machine running Ubuntu Linux 12.04.

Interested in more information about this Inateck KTU3FR 4P PCI express card? You can watch my video review of this product.