Windows 8 provides native USB3.0 drivers
Good point -- as I have a dual-boot system running both Win7 and Win8.1. After I installed Win7, the USB3 performance was poor and disconnects frequent. But, when I finally discovered the NEC site that had both firmware updates and driver updates, and applied both, the USB3 performance improved dramatically and the disconnects stopped.

When I installed Win8.1, I ran some throughput tests and discovered the results were much the same as with the NEC drivers, so I left them alone. So, are you saying the native USB 3.0 drivers in Win8 are an improvement over Win7?