Sonnet Technologies Allegro USB-C 4-port PCIe Card Thunderbolt compatible usb adapter

Four-Port USB-C PCIe Card

The Allegro card adds four USB-C ports to a Mac Pro, Windows PC or Linux system through a PCIe slot. It is Thunderbolt compatible and uses dual 10Gb controllers to deliver USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds. Each port supplies 7.5W of bus power so portable drives can run without an external adapter. Builders who need FireWire 1394 connectivity or more than four ports will need a different solution.

Dual-Controller Sustained Throughput

Two independent 10Gbps controllers prevent the bandwidth bottleneck that appears on single-controller cards when several drives transfer at once. The architecture keeps each pair of ports on its own controller, so sustained read and write performance scales with the number of active devices. Intelligent power management regulates current to stop bus-powered drives from dropping off the bus during long copy jobs. Workloads that demand more than 10Gbps per controller will still hit the ceiling.

Standard PCIe Installation

The half-height bracket fits a regular PCIe slot and requires no auxiliary power cable. Drivers load natively on modern macOS, Windows and Linux kernels so the ports appear immediately after boot. The only common issue is motherboards that cannot supply the full 7.5W per port from the slot alone; in those cases bus-powered drives may disconnect under heavy load. Systems without a free PCIe slot cannot use this card.