I have a workstation built around an ASUS motherboard - I’m pretty sure it’s an M4A89GTD Pro - that has had flaky USB 3 performance since day one. The USB 2 ports are rock solid, but plugging things into the USB 3 ports provokes all kinds of odd failures - drives turn to ghosts that can’t be accessed or deleted from the list, transfer rates drop to near-zero, etc. (System is under Win7 Ultimate.)
I have reached a point where I really need reliable USB 3 performance, to move files from this system to a new one I’m building for another location. Here’s the question, and I’d appreciate the most specific answers I can get from someone who might have done much the same thing:
**If I disable the mobo USB 3 feature and install a PCIe USB 3 card, will I likely be bypassing the problematic part of the system and get reliable USB 3 performance? **(Any recommendations on a short-tab USB 3 card, BTW?)
A useless answer since I have not done that, and do not know; but with a M4A78T-E that didn’t have USB 3 I put in a cheap PCIe card with 4 slots and it has worked perfectly ( without extra drivers since this is linux ).
Since the PCIe buses are separate from the inbuilt USB system I can’t see how the latter could impact PCI performance.
Not useless. I am about 99% sure that a different hardware piece using a different driver will get around the problem, and it’s good to hear that a plug-in card has worked so reliably.
The problem with just trying it out isn’t cost - it’s that the system is very tightly built and it will be a fair job to put the card in the one remaining PCIe 1x slot.
But I will probably just have to do it and see. I am hoping someone has had the same situation of replacing mobo USB3 with a separate adapter, and been successful…
It’s very difficult to say for sure, since the problems you see could have a wide variety of sources, ranging from analog problems with the traces on the motherboard to driver problems.
However, I’d say that the greater proportion of possible causes lie in the range of things that would be avoided with an add-in card, and therefore an add-in would have a good likelihood of fixing the issue.
I’m not sure why you’d be having so much trouble; your board uses an add-on Renesas USB 3.0 controller like my system has and I’ve not had any trouble with it. Maybe Asus screwed up and didn’t provide those ports with enough power…
have you grabbed the latest driver from Asus’s website?
UPDATE: A replacement card, which was tricky to squeeze into the one remaining PCIe(4) slot between graphics cards, seems to have worked. I had some trouble loading the driver, as it wanted three separate load and reboot passes, but with that and disabling the onboard USB3 ports, I’ve had reliable USB3 connections ever since. Humbly submitted to the bitstream for further users, yr obt srvt, etc.