USB 3 Headers @ USB 3 External Drive Z87X-UD4H

[kjcmjc2014]

My first UD4H on board sound did not work so I exchanged it. The second UD4H boards front USB 3 header would not work. Only the secondary header worked.  I screwed up when taking that board apart for another exchange and bent a CPU pin so I have to eat that board. I am waiting for a call back from Gigabyte to see how much a new CPU socket would cost?

So I got a third UD4H board tonight and the front USB 3 header will not work on the front USB 3 panel. If I plug my cable into the secondary 3.0 header it works fine. Its the main header (by memory) that does not work. This has happened in two different UD4H boards. I emailed Gigabyte yesterday and I still have not heard from them. I have XHCI enabled, I also tried Smart Auto and the main header still will not work. When I plug in my BlacX Duet 3.0 to the front panel I get a message that the USB drive is not recognized. When I plug in the same BlacX to the front panel  when its connected to the secondary header my drive opens up and works at 3.0 speeds.  A USB 3 thumb drive will open up when the front panel is connected to the main header but it operates at below USB 2 speeds. If the same drive plugs into the front panel and its connected to the secondary header it work a lot faster. F7 Bios, latest Intel Chipset software, all windows updates.

I have a Seagate 3.0 Backup plus drive it worked great on my AMD Gigabyte board. Now with the UD4H windows explorer will not see it nor will device manager, or disk management. This drive is plugged into a USB 3 back plug. I found a registry hack for Windows 8.1 and it now stays online and when I reboot it works.

Any ideas? Thanks

i7 4770K
16 GB DDR3 1600 Mem
Zotac GTX 570

[dmdilks]

I found a registry hack for Windows 8.1 and it now stays online and when I reboot it works. 

Don't you just love windows 8.1. That might be your USB problem too. But with the USB thing in your bios is it set to auto try changing it to enabled if you can.

One of these days Microsoft will wake up. But more likely they are to brain dead to realize what is going on. Plus this is coming out of a mouth of a Microsoft partner too.

I have to ask is the memory 2 sticks or 4? The only reason I ask is people are having problems with 4 sticks.

I'm adding this after I look at the book. Windows might having a problem with this - xHCI or EHCI controllers It could just be the way it is setup too. Boy you can really pull your hair this one - XHCI Mode (Intel® Z87 Chipset) .

[kjcmjc2014]

Ok, tried 2 sticks memory no go. I tried every setting in XHCI and the front header would not recognize the BlacX. Power is getting to the BlacX from the front header because the Superspeed indicator lights up on the Black X.

Now another problem. I copied a 4 gig file from the BlacX to my desktop while it was connected to the rear USB 3 header and it copied over fast. I then tried to copy the same file back over to the BlacX the first few files copied fast then  not even a quarter way through it stopped copying with no error messages. So I then hooked up the BlacX to one of my rear USB 3 (back of computer) ports and ran the same test and both transfers to and from worked as they should.

Now I am starting to wonder if the front panel is defective? I am going to buy another one and see what happens. I will keep you posted. Thanks

[kjcmjc]

Ok purchased new front USB 3 front panel and still no luck. I even did a clean install with Windows 7 and all of the updates were installed from windows update and drivers from gigabyte and the front header would not recognize the Thermaltake Blacx duet 5g. I installed the blacx to the rear USB 3 port and it worked fine under Win 7 SP1.

 I then reinstalled windows 8.1 and updated everything from MS and Gigabyte. I tried the blacx right after installing each driver and could not isolate any specific driver. Also tested before any driver was updated after Win 8.1 was installed. I then went into BIOS and tried every setting for the xHCI controller and no luck on the front panel. I then disabled xHCI in the BIOS and the blacx was recognized plugged into the front port, it ran at USB 2 speed (30 mg sec) but it worked copying files to and from the blacx. The blacx did also work in win 8.1 on the back panel.

 So I now know it's not 8.1 because the caddy would not work under win 7. It's not the front panel itself because I tried a new usb 3 panel along with my original one (bitinex and vantec) The front panel worked with xHCI disabled in the bios at 2.0 speed.

I have a support ticket with Gigabyte the first response I got from them was to update drivers and install USB 3 hot fix from MS, the hot fix will not install on win 8.1 it was made for win 8. As of this rant I have installed all windows update for 8.1 and all drivers from Gigabyte website for my MB.

My guess now it's a USB 3 controller problem or a z87 chipset problem?  The reason I think it's the controller or chipset is because this is the same problem now on two different motherboards ( same model) 

[dmdilks]

By what I'm reading out there is you are not the only one having problems. When you disable the XHCI in the bios what it does it goes to the EHCI controller.

I don't know why you would have two different conlrollers on a board. When the XHCI should take care of everything by what I'm reading.

But I think what is going on here is they are not all the way there yet. That is why they have two different controllers on the boards.

Support for all speeds

The OHCI and UHCI controllers support only USB 1 speed devices (1.5 Mbit/s and 12 Mbit/s), and the EHCI only supports USB 2 devices (480 Mbit/s).

The xHCI architecture was designed to support all USB speeds, including SuperSpeed (5 Gbit/s) and future speeds, under a single driver stack.

I think at this point they might not know what is really going on themselves.