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[SOLVED] USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 4:44 am
by 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.

Re: USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 12:41 am
by catweazel
*shove*

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

Re: USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 5:45 am
by 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

Re: USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 5:51 am
by catweazel
Lanser wrote: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?

Re: USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 12:40 am
by Lanser
You are welcome. Sounds like you have the whole problem determination process under control.

cheers

[SOLVED] USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 1:17 am
by catweazel
Lanser wrote: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.

Re: [SOLVED] USB3 weirdness with WD external drives

Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 9:55 pm
by 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.