Rocketfish USB3 and External Hard drive (ejecting randomly)

[jaredkipe]

I got the Rocketfish USB 3 PCIe card to work easily enough using the included generic USB3 multi beast installer.

Things were looking pretty good, I was able to duplicate a USB3 hard drive to a bare internal drive (disk util restore), and while the disk technically wasn't mounted, this went just find and pretty speedy.

Thats where things stopped going so well, I tried encrypting the external drive, had some problems where the disk would just 'eject' improperly randomly (within 30 min of booting).

I thought it had something to do with CoreStorage (encryption), so I erased it and started to try to use it as a TimeMachine disk (normal disk). I ended up having the same problems.

I've disabled disk sleep, swapped the external HDD and power adapter. I can find no reason for the 'ejects incorrectly' after a couple of minutes, thus I have to assume it is an issue with the USB3 card/kext combo.

Any ideas?

 

[the_gael]

assuming you don't have a driver issue - like installing an unneeded one - or not installing one when needed it is most likely bios config.

I am not familiar with your board but imagine most of the bios settings won't be that different to mine on Z77X-UD5H, I posted them in another thread and a few people have used them as the basis for setting up their boards.
On my machine USB3.0 works beautifully and I use a 3TB WD MyDrive for timemachine on USB3.0.

here is the link to my bios settings

 

[Fokke]

What cables did you use?

I had random eject problems with the USB3 ports on my Hack, with the same UP4 board you use. (so not your pcie card)
The problem only occurred when i used my front USB ports that are on a Hot Swap bay, AND when i use a 1meter USB cable, AND i used my Sharkoon docking station.

I swapped the cable and all is fine again. I use the cable for something else without any hiccup. Also on my rMBP all is fine with the same cable and docking station.

Try some other cables. It might help @ your place too.

Be sure to use the latest Zenith's generic USB. 1.2.7 is today's current.

 

[jaredkipe]

assuming you don't have a driver issue - like installing an unneeded one - or not installing one when needed it is most likely bios config.

I am not familiar with your board but imagine most of the bios settings won't be that different to mine on Z77X-UD5H, I posted them in another thread and a few people have used them as the basis for setting up their boards.
On my machine USB3.0 works beautifully and I use a 3TB WD MyDrive for timemachine on USB3.0.

here is the link to my bios settings

Sorry, I didn't mention the logic board in this case is a P55m-UD2 with Rocketfish USB 3 card.
I doubt Bios would help in this case.

What cables did you use?

I had random eject problems with the USB3 ports on my Hack, with the same UP4 board you use. (so not your pcie card)
The problem only occurred when i used my front USB ports that are on a Hot Swap bay, AND when i use a 1meter USB cable, AND i used my Sharkoon docking station.

I swapped the cable and all is fine again. I use the cable for something else without any hiccup. Also on my rMBP all is fine with the same cable and docking station.

Try some other cables. It might help @ your place too.

Be sure to use the latest Zenith's generic USB. 1.2.7 is today's current.

I used the oddly shapped USB3 cable that came with the HDD,s but I have tried 2 different sets of power/hdd/cables as part of my troubleshooting process (thought I might have gotten a bum drive). My MBP with USB3 has no problems with these same drives.

I will look at the version of the driver and see if it needs an upgrade.

 

[jaredkipe]

After some experimentation (and upgrading to 1.2.6->1.2.7). I can say there is probably some kind of SW issue at play here.

Un-mounted drive to drive copy results in ~150MBps bandwidth over USB3. (internal SATA 3TB disk to USB3 4TB disk).
I assume that is using /dev/rdiskx and something similar to dd.

Mounted 'Finder Copy' gets messed up and never copies over 2MBps and is very spikey. I'd say on average less than 500kBps.

Same results using command line 'ditto -rsrc -V'.
Oddly, 'cp -R' managed to get up to 150MBps but only for the first 5-10 seconds then quickly deteriorated back to nothing/similar results to 'Finder'.

Switch the drive over to USB2 and suddenly all methods are capping 30-40MBps.

Something super fishy is going on with USB3...

 

[jaredkipe]

Bump.
I've been unable to resolve the issue.

Does anyone have a PCIe USB3 card they can recommend (non built in USB3)?

 

[jaredkipe]

Ok, issue resolved (mostly...).
I googled around and found some 'real mac' users having somewhat similar issues with my Seagate drives.
Running a Seagate utility that keeps the drive from auto-sleeping, resolved the un-mounting randomly, but did NOT resolve the transfer speed issues.

I went ahead and got a WD drive out of desperation and surprise surprise, the WD drive behaves just fine out of the box.

Moral of the story, it seems that Seagate GoFlex Desk drives have somewhat buggy/non-standard firmware. (unexplained how the rdisk transfers were fine, just mounted performance was so bad).

 

[Fokke]

I have a Seagate GoFlex too. Its fine on USB3.