For security reasons no future version of USB will implement DMA either.Īs was also previously mentioned, Thunderbolt carries PCIe so this is an option for external connection. There is no tweak or kludge that can address this problem - it is fundamentally impossible. Which makes sense since they are all electrically very similar.īandwidth is not of any significant consideration, as most forms of USB do have enough to support a PCI type interface, even if not at the full speed of the target interface.Īs Jamie Hanrahan eluded to on the comments of the first answer, it is not possible to bridge USB to PCIe because of the lack of DMA (Direct Memory Access) support. It's pretty interesting though, as PCIe, SATA, Thunderbolt and USB are all on a path to converging.

Thunderbolt 2, or 3 if you have it, has good support for external graphics and is your best bet at this point for generic device support. I'm not aware of a generic USB to PCIe translation 'driver' for any OS, but I'd be surprised if people aren't working on it. Most of the solutions I've seen have limited application in terms of PCIe cards that they support mostly because of a lack of driver support - graphics over usb is poorly supported by anyone at this point storage devices have the most support. I'm not aware of any commercial 3.1 products that have general pcie support. USB 3.1 (which is electrically compatible with thunderbolt 3) has more options, but is only starting to roll out. If you have USB 3.0 there are limited commercial options - things like the ASUS XG Station 2 which uses 2 usb connections for its external pcie Nvidia card, but accepts other cards (apparently just graphics): There are some on the market now, like this one for thunderbolt 2:

Pcie usb 3 card in pcie x4 slot