USB 3 causes Mavericks to hang?

[mfbernstein]

A few months back, I added a USB 3 PCIe card to my Lynnfield-based system (Gigabyte P55-UD3R, i7 860) and started experiencing periodic hangs. Symptoms are that the mouse and keyboard stop responding to input, and I can't ping or ssh in to the system. The only solution is to reboot (power button). The hangs seemed to coincide with times when I was using the mouse (both mouse and keyboard were USB). Unfortunately, they didn't leave anything in the logs (no error messages or KPs) so I couldn't diagnose it.

At any rate, I've updated to a new Haswell-based rig (Gigabyte Z87MZ-D3H, i5 4670k) and I'm seeing the same problem with increasing regularity. I'm using the USB 3 on the motherboard now, not from the PCIe card. I sometimes also now get hangs just copying data from an external USB drive. I tried the recommendation of using the USB 3 rollback in MultiBeast 3.0, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

On a whim, I disconnected all my devices from the USB 3 ports and plugged them into a USB 2 one (using a hub in between). The past few days, I've not had any hangs.

Has anybody else experienced this? And if so, is there any fix to get USB 3 working? I can live with USB 2 for most things, but for external HDDs, it's really a pain.

 

[mfbernstein]

2 more days running rock solid with USB 2. Since the problem isn't specific to any given chipset, I wonder if the bug has to do with the generic USB 3 drivers. Unfortunately, I don't have Mountain Lion handy to compare.

 

[mfbernstein]

Well, I spoke too soon. It hung yesterday while entering a URL in Safari. Today, it hung when I was dd'ing a disk image. Both of these are using USB 2 (I've disconnected all my USB 3 devices).

On the other hand, I ran memtest86 yesterday and prime95 overnight with no errors, so I'm fairly certain the hardware is not at fault. Time for a fresh install of Mavericks, I guess...