Home > Consumer Reviews > Adaptec USB 2.0/1394 Combo Card PCI 3-Port USB 2.0 & 2-Port Firewire MAC/PC (1923200)

Let me try to make a long story short.

I bought a Dazzle Firewire card with Ulead software so that I could capture video. I didn't work when I got it and I never got it to work in spite of multiple attempts. Dazzle Techs said it was Ulead's fault and Ulead said it was Dazzle's. Neither company tried to help me out.

I bought the adaptec combo card, hoping that it would work.
I installed it and the accompanying software. It didn't work.
I called Canon. They helped me by sending me to Microsoft for
a plug-in. The card still didn't work. I just about gave up but decided to call Adaptec for help.

It was a toll call but the Adaptec Tech walked me through the
entire process of getting the card working. I'd guess that he spend a good 45 mintues with me as we checked my system out and straightened out all the problems that the Dazzle card and drivers left in my system. I am a business owner so I know exactly how important good customer care is. You can have the best product in the world but if you don't care about your customers, you're business is going to eventually fail.

Adaptec makes a great product AND they have one of the very best Tech Support teams that I have ever dealt with to back the product.

Buy This One !

Another review writer mentioned overlapping IRQs - which suggests they were out of the loop when the entire computer world changed to Level Triggered IRQs. In a nutshell, current systems are designed to share IRQs, this is a critical function for any system. If you have older PCI based cards or a computer older than 4 years this is when you can see problems, as they use what are called Edge Triggered IRQs and are not shareable.

Still, installing add-in cards to your PC is not for the faint of heart or the uninformed, even with the advances in Plug and Play technologies. Get your friendly neighborhood computer genius to help if you don't feel you're savvy enough.

That being said, this card from Adaptec works flawlessly, and has some nice features designed into it. The bus mastering PCI functions work reasonably well, unlike some lower priced cards that seem to cause more lock-ups and pauses. The addition of an internal Firewire and USB connections are a great help to case modders and others who build their own systems yet still want ports on the front side of their machine so they don't have to reach around the back. Having USB and Firewire on the same card is handy, since most older systems using USB 1.1 use a riser card that can be replaced easily with the Adaptec.

A good value for a complete high-speed hot pluggable I/O solution.

This is a great card and a great idea from a reliable company - as long as you don't have a complex system running Windows 2000.

After I installed this card on my system, all chaos broke loose. This eventually caused Windows 2000 to become corrupt and crash and burn. I had to totally rebuild my system from scratch, wasting many hours. So it is buyer beware.

It turns out that this card needs four IRQs. Now I already had a soundcards, a couple of Adaptec brand SCSI cards, and a graphics adapter. Problem is that under Windows 2000, all of these PCI cards are assigned IRQ 9. (The only way to prevent this (on my system anyway) is to disable ACPI Power Management - a job bigger than Ben Hur). Result: hardware conflict, system freeze-ups, driver corruption, and BSODs (Blue Screen of Death).

In summary: The DuoConnect 3121 is a good card. But if you run Windows 2000, have a lot of PCI cards, and you don't know an IRQ from ACPI or BSOD, then better stay away from it. Go for something simpler, like an Adaptec 4300. I am told that the DuoConnect 3121 installs without problems on Windows XP, which is more flexible with IRQs.

Yet I do not entirely blame the Adaptec company for the problem - though they could have warned me, the unsuspecting consumer, about the insallation risks in the marketing brochures! So therefore only 3 stars.

I can't fault Adaptec on their very good support. Adapter cards from other companies are cheaper than Adaptec brand, but the Adaptec support is worth the extra money. Which is why I replaced this card with another card from the same company. Adaptec refunded my original purchase price (but not the many wasted hours). So therefore at least 3 stars.

When making the decision to spend upwards of twice as much for an Adaptec product over a smaller brand, once expects that they are dealing with a professional company with good support.

Fact: the DuoConnect, even with the latest 3.x drivers, is not supported under Windows 2000 or XP in a multi-processor environment (even workstations).

Fact: this useful bit of information is *NOT* mentioned anywhere on Adaptec's site -- not on the product info page, not in the knowledge base, not in the install guide (jeez!) and not in the user manual. The only place you'll find it is in a brief note in the readme file accompanying the drivers, or if you install the product and your machine blows up.

This is completely unacceptable for a company like Adaptec -- this should be obvious to people before they buy the card or try to install it.

And as for support? Let's just say that Adaptec is not what they used to be. Long wait times, bad attitudes and unhelpful "policies."

Methinks Adaptec is being propped up by a name built on former glories. It's no longer worth it to pay more over Belkin, D-Link, etc. if the support [is] just as bad.

Note: one of the reps said this card is having "lot of issues" under Windows 2000 aside from the multi-processor bug.

STEER CLEAR!

I purchased the Adaptec AUA-3230 DuoConnect card at my local retailer for use with my "Quicksilver" model Power Mac G4 (Dual 1GHz). My built-in ports had gone flakey so I wanted a quality PCI expansion card to replace their functionality. Adaptec used to make some of the fastest SCSI cards around, so I decided to give their product a try. I picked the DuoConnect so I could get some USB 2.0 ports while I was at it.

Well, it's very fast -- when copying between internal and external devices, it is faster than Apple's built-in FireWire was! Unfortunately, it has problems -- of the crashing sort. When a firewire device is connected and the Mac is put to sleep, it doesn't make it to Deep Sleep mode (fans keep running), and wakes up again. (This happened with both a bus-powered iPod and a self-powered LaCie d2 drive. The LaCie showed truly strange behavior of spinning down, then up, then down, six times in a row before finally stopping!) The only way out is to turn the Mac off. I contacted Adaptec tech support via their web page.

After a brief of confusion in which they thought I was using USB devices, Adaptec support tested the configuration themselves, confirmed the problem, and suggested that I either disable Sleep mode, or return the card to the retailer from which I purchased it. Following are their own words:

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In our unofficial testing of the Firewire 4300 and DuoConnect AUA-3121 and AUA-3020, it seems that the controller itself is compatible with Deep Sleep. Yet as soon as any devices are attached to either the USB or FireWire/1394 ports, the system will not be able to recover from the Deep Sleep function.

It appears that this issue is due more to the PCI bus itself rather than to the DuoConnect adapter. When Deep Sleep is initiated, the PCI bus and attached peripherals will be powered down. Yet because the PCI controller is not directly powered from the motherboard, there is no way to send a signal to the attached devices to 'wake' them. This means that a signal can be sent to the attached devices to put them into a power down status, but no signal can be sent to revive them from that state. For that reason the Firewire and DuoConnect card is not fully compliant with Apple's Deep Sleep.

What you may want to do at this point is to open up the Energy Saver control panel and set the power settings to "never" to disable Sleep. Yet if this is not an option, then unfortunately there is no workaround for this issue and you may want to return the controller to the place of purchase for a refund.

We apologize for the delay in getting this information to you. It did take some time to replicate the issue and search for a possible solution. We hope that you understand.
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So, in summary: very fast FireWire 400/USB 2.0 card, but useless if your Power Mac ever sleeps. Adaptec's tech support was prompt and didn't send me "form letter" style replies, so props for that! I'll try Adaptec again in the future due to their support team (it's also why I give this card 2 stars instead of just 1), but I'll always beware and make sure there is a good return policy, just in case.