ASUS G74SX USB 3.0 Issues

[Muzz]

This is likely more related to your BIOS boot settings than any issue with the drive. Back when I did workstation support, the first thing I would have suggested to anyone that called in with this problem was to check for USB drives still plugged in.

Yes, you could be right about that. A PC tech guy told me to check the bios settings as well. I wouldn't have thought plugging in an external HD would alter the way the computer boots but I guess its possible. Anyway, I never bothered to check. I just unplug the drive before booting up. Thanks.

[diegotrigo]

I have exactly the same problem with a HP 1TB USB3.0.
It connects, but disconnects on copying or reading big files.

Thanks...

[dstrakele]

ASUS laptops have a utility pre-installed called "ASUS Ai Charger: http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/ai_charger/
I actually use this utility to charge my smartphone whether the laptop is powered on or off - works great! However, I wonder if it somehow interferes with the external USB drives. It may be worthwhile disabling or uninstalling this utility to test this idea. I do not have an external USB drive with this issue to test it myself.

Is your HP drive powered externally or does it draw it's power from the USB port?

[LarsM]

I don't believe the internal drives effect this in any way. They're on a completely different interface. I use three different WD external drives, and they all seem to work okay. (I've used them on a G74 that had Seagate HHDs, and two that had WD HHDs.)

There are couple known vulnerabilities with external 3.0 drives....maybe you were running into one of them. (1) Their cabling is very picky and can fail easily. Many people have found that just using a different (and often, shorter) cable resolves their issue. (2) Chastity claims that manufacturers push the limits of the USB power spec, and that some drives require more juice, particularly at spin-up, than the port can supply. It seems weird that this would be unit-specific, rather than model-specific, but I defer to her expertise.

Hi Brodyboy.
I address you, since you have the black belt
I have the same problems with my g53sx, and i assume it doesn't matter if it's 53 or 74. Just got it 2 weeks ago and encountered the problem right away because I had my Passport as backup device with my old pc and tried to copy files to my new g53sx. It was OS win XP whitout usb3.0, but I don't think that matter.
My WD passport 3.0 1 tb connect/disconnect repeatedly for a while, until my g53sx desides there is nothing there. It doesn't matter if i'm copying files or not. (Usb2.0 works fine, just like others here report.)
Asus Tech-support wanted me to test with other 3.0 devices, but I cannot afford that. And I can't borrow any. My wiew is that this should work on a high-end pc whitout problems like this. But I cant decide if I should reclaim my money and send it back, because it is the best pc i've had. And I've had several the last 18 years.
Is it possible to sum up what I should do to try to repair the usb3.0 issue, so it works with my WD Passport?

You have talked about uninstalling the drivers, and auto-reinstall them. And adjusting the power to the usb-port.
What would your advice be today?
And how do I do this? Thank you for your answer.

Best regards
LarsM

[BrodyBoy]

Is it possible to sum up what I should do to try to repair the usb3.0 issue, so it works with my WD Passport?

You have talked about uninstalling the drivers, and auto-reinstall them. And adjusting the power to the usb-port.
What would your advice be today?
And how do I do this? Thank you for your answer.

Best regards
LarsM

Hi Lars, welcome to the forum.

I'm sorry you're having this issue that has plagued so many G-series owners. Unfortunately, I don't know of a sure-fire fix. I still think it seems like a power issue....for some reason, it seems like the port is detected as idle, so the computer puts it into a power-saving mode. I could be completely wrong, of course, but that's what the behavior sounds like to me.

I can only sugest you try the steps already discussed:
(1) Download the latest USB driver (there's new one I haven't tried....it's worth a shot! 3.5.24.0)
(2) Uninstall the current USB 3.0 driver
(3) Uninstall the all USB devices in Device Manager
(4) Turn off the USB power-saving options in Windows Power Management (or P4G, if you're using that)
(5) Reboot, and let WIndows re-install all the standard USB devices
(6) Install the new USB 3.0 driver

Beyond that, the only thing I can tell you is that I've never had this issue on my G-series that runs a clean installation. I think others have tried resolving this problem with clean installations, but I don't know what all they installed (there are different interpretations of "clean"....), so I can't really conclude whether that is the difference in my configuration.

PS: If you can, be sure to try the "low-tech" troubleshooting option.....use a different USB 3.0 cable. Prefereably, a really short one.

[LarsM]

Hi Lars, welcome to the forum.

I'm sorry you're having this issue that has plagued so many G-series owners. Unfortunately, I don't know of a sure-fire fix. I still think it seems like a power issue....for some reason, it seems like the port is detected as idle, so the computer puts it into a power-saving mode. I could be completely wrong, of course, but that's what the behavior sounds like to me.

I can only sugest you try the steps already discussed:
(1) Download the latest USB driver (there's new one I haven't tried....it's worth a shot! 3.5.24.0)
(2) Uninstall the current USB 3.0 driver
(3) Uninstall the all USB devices in Device Manager
(4) Turn off the USB power-saving options in Windows Power Management (or P4G, if you're using that)
(5) Reboot, and let WIndows re-install all the standard USB devices
(6) Install the new USB 3.0 driver

Beyond that, the only thing I can tell you is that I've never had this issue on my G-series that runs a clean installation. I think others have tried resolving this problem with clean installations, but I don't know what all they installed (there are different interpretations of "clean"....), so I can't really conclude whether that is the difference in my configuration.

PS: If you can, be sure to try the "low-tech" troubleshooting option.....use a different USB 3.0 cable. Prefereably, a really short one.

Hi Brody, and thanks a lot
I didn't adjust any power, but I followed step 1 - 6 above.
I also uninstalled the WD-smartware, just incase.

AND IT WORKED!

When I installed the driver from the link above, I also runned a program file called Asus-patch something... It followed in the downloaded zip-file with the driver-file. I don't know if it was crucial to fix the problem but it seems to work now.
I have done security copying to my WD Passport, and transfer of large files from the Passport to the Notebook. 6 Gb in about a minute. During the file transfer it said the transfer speed was 45 - 60 MB/sec.
Is this the corect speed for the usb3.0?

Thank you for your help. This was fantastic :-)
Lars

[BrodyBoy]

That's great, Lars! I'm really glad you got it working!

[diegotrigo]

Actually, I just update the driver using the link from @BrodyBoy (above) and worked like a charm.
I didn't do the steps 1-6. Just the update and the Asus-patch that is inside the zip.

:-)

Thanks @BrodyBoy

[BrodyBoy]

Actually, I just update the driver using the link from @BrodyBoy (above) and worked like a charm.
I didn't do the steps 1-6. Just the update and the Asus-patch that is inside the zip.

:-)

Thanks @BrodyBoy

You're welcome! Glad it's fixed!

[Oakfield]

Having the same issue here. Brand new G74sx. I tried the steps listed above with no luck. Then I updated the driver with Asus LiveUpdate, and still no luck.

I have a 1TB WD Passport connected with a USB 3.0 cable. It disconnects after a minute or two when transferring files. It works fine when plugged into the USB 2.0 ports on the G74sx, as well as when it is plugged into USB 3.0 ports on a different computer.

The useless person I spoke to at Asus tech support acted like this was a unique situation and told me my only course of action was to bring it back to Best Buy and let them fix it.