[SOLVED] USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

[catweazel]

I have two USB3 WD external hard drives. They are connected to individual USB3 ports. If I boot Mint 14 (this happens in both Cinnamon and KDE) with the drives turned off then the drives are detected and mounted when I turn them on. However if I boot with the drives turned on then they aren't detected and not mounted. They don't show up in fdisk. Turning them off, waiting for a few seconds, then turning them back on doesn't help either.

Does anyone have any pointers that might help me troubleshoot this weirdness?

Thanks for reading.

[catweazel]

*shove*

Does anyone have any idea what can be done about this USB3 issue?

[Lanser]

Machine type model or Mobo model could help with this type of question.
Have you look at the boot prefs in the BIOS and the USB cfg settings ?

Lanser

[catweazel]

Machine type model or Mobo model could help with this type of question.

Maybe so, but...

Code: Select all

lspci -v

... would be more useful. The point being, the drives are detected on the USB3 bus if the machine is booted while the drives are off, as I already stated.

Code: Select all

   $ lspci -v
   07:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04) (prog-if 30 [XHCI])
   Subsystem: Giga-byte Technology Device 5007
   Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
   Memory at fbcfe000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
   Capabilities: <access denied>
   Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd


Have you look at the boot prefs in the BIOS and the USB cfg settings ?

What do boot preferences have to do with it?

[Lanser]

You are welcome. Sounds like you have the whole problem determination process under control.

cheers

[catweazel]

You are welcome. Sounds like you have the whole problem determination process under control.

Indeed I do. I merely wanted to see if you did.

Western Digital deny any knowledge of their external USB3 drives working with Linux. They don't know and they don't care. They say the drives work fine on Windwoes and that's the OS the drives are designed for.

[catweazel]

Ah ha! Gotcha. It turns out the native USB3 ports on the motherboard, all of them, front and back, don't provide sufficient current for these drives. I bought a 2 port USB3 PCIx with a molex power connector on it that provides additional current to the ports.

The drives are now functioning as they should.