Just an FYI for anybody who is interested:

Last week I ordered USB 3.0 Expresscard for my old (five or six years) Dell e1750 Intel dual core laptop so I could connect at USB 3.0 external hard disk at full speed for Kinect capture. The card arrived yesterday and I tested it last night.

Works great! 30fps, uncompressed, and no dropped frames.

The model I got is a two port card made by StarTech, purchased from Amazon. Here's the Amazon product page:

StarTech.com 2 Port ExpressCard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter

The only issue I found was that the card's drivers were not on the CD that came with it. However, the drivers were easy to find on StarTech's website. One note: If you're running with Windows 7, the drivers may already be installed on your computer; in my case, I needed to install them manually because this laptop is running with Windows XP Professional and I don't intend to upgrade it.

The hard drive I'm using is a 1TB USB 3.0 MyBook made by Western Digital. This replaces the eSATA mini-RAID I was using previously.

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

One more note:

You should connect the Kinect to an existing USB 2.0 port and NOT to the USB 3.0 card. While this may technically work, it's certainly better to dedicate the card to the hard disk.

Hope this info is useful to other users considering this route.

Wish I could do this with my newer tablet PC because it's actually a more powerful computer; unfortunately the tablet doesn't have an Expresscard slot. Oh, well...this functionality gives my old computer a second life. :)

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!