File transfers through USB 3.0 keep disconnecting

[darknightz0117]

Hello,

I've searched the internet and I can't find a solution for this.

I have several USB 3.0 external hard drives and they all seem to exhibit this problem. First, I had a Western Digital MyPassport SE 1TB with USB 3.0. Transfers of 1GB or less are usually fine, but once it gets higher than that, the drive disconnects. It disconnects before the transfer is complete, usually disconnecting about 5 seconds after transfer begins. I thought something was wrong with the hard drive, so I had it RMAd. New drive came back and still didn't work.

This year's Black Friday gave me a Western Digital Elements 1TB also with USB 3.0 capabilities. Same as before: files bigger than 1GB will not transfer. And yesterday I was graced with a Western Digital MyPassport 2TB but unfortunately the same problem occurs.

For all of these drives, I can transfer large files through USB 2.0 connections, no problem. I would be happy with this but... I was really looking forward to using my computer's USB 3.0 connection for the faster speeds. I've tried updating drivers for the port but I still have the problem. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Here are links to the hard drives:

Western Digital MyPassport SE 1TB (mine was new):
Newegg.com - Refurbished: Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 3.0/USB 2.0 Black Portable Hard Drive WDBACX0010BBK

Western Digital MyPassport 2TB:

Newegg.com - Western Digital My Passport 2TB USB 3.0/USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDBY8L0020BBK-NESN

Western Digital Elements SE 1 TB:

Newegg.com - Western Digital Elements SE 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive WDBPCK0010BBK-NESN

Here is the link to my laptop:

ASUS - Notebooks- ASUS U46E

I have the i5 CPU and Windows Home Premium.

 

[koalasy]

why not have a look at my paste "My Method to fix the windows 7 mouse randomly freezing issue "
I think you can not use usb3.0 now, I might be wrong.

 

[TVeblen]

Some laptops have a problem with power to the USB ports. That's the first thing I suspect when I see the drives randomly disconnecting. One drive doing it makes me focus on the drive, 2 drives doing it makes me focus on the port.

As koalasy points out, the USB 3.0 protocol is currently being implemented independently by the different manufacturers. The standard is not "built-in" to all Intel or AMD chipsets yet. Anytime this happens you can get bugs from any non-compliance with the standards. This may or may not be the case here.

The power requirements for USB 3.0 are different than that of USB 2. The USB 3 port has more connectors and the USB 3 cable has more wires. So if for some reason you were using a USB 2 cable that would account for it. (A defective USB 3 cable too).

Be sure you are running on the power supply and not just battery to test. If this works it could be something as simple as power settings.

 

[darknightz0117]

Some laptops have a problem with power to the USB ports. That's the first thing I suspect when I see the drives randomly disconnecting. One drive doing it makes me focus on the drive, 2 drives doing it makes me focus on the port.

As koalasy points out, the USB 3.0 protocol is currently being implemented independently by the different manufacturers. The standard is not "built-in" to all Intel or AMD chipsets yet. Anytime this happens you can get bugs from any non-compliance with the standards. This may or may not be the case here.

The power requirements for USB 3.0 are different than that of USB 2. The USB 3 port has more connectors and the USB 3 cable has more wires. So if for some reason you were using a USB 2 cable that would account for it. (A defective USB 3 cable too).

Be sure you are running on the power supply and not just battery to test. If this works it could be something as simple as power settings.

I'm using the USB 3.0 cables that were shipped with the drives.

I suspect something is wrong with the port too, but what can I do to fix it? I run my laptop with the battery out, and the power supply plugged in.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Does the drive have a connector for auxiliary power? (It likely needs a power supply of 5 Volts and 1.5+ Amps) If not, you can try a powered (i.e. with its own power supply) USB 3 hub.

Also, try what I said in this post (I know it's for a mice, but it's about the computer's USB power options, do what is applicable)

Also, last but not least, you can try a better file transfer software, in case the Win7 one is freaking out somehow.
I use FastCopy which has a crappy interface but is simple to use, but there is also Teracopy. Either is better and uses pretty much 0 resources when compared to doing a copy-paste.

 

[boohbah]

i recently had the same issue, i was moving a 280 gb folder from one external to another,
after a few tries of it disconnecting after copying about 30Gb i tried terra copy, and although it would still disconnect it would do it after about 140Gb , i was also able to continue with terra copy once i had reconnected the external ,it will ask to overwrite files already copied, i selected no. and it would continue where it left off, it would delete the file it was in the middle of copying when it disconnected then after it completed the entire copy it re copied that deleted file
give it a try if it works great, if not no harm done

some people have reported problems with terracopy so you could try
richcopy that gets decent reports too...

Free Utility: RichCopy, an Advanced Alternative to RoboCopy

 

[darknightz0117]

Does the drive have a connector for auxiliary power? (It likely needs a power supply of 5 Volts and 1.5+ Amps) If not, you can try a powered (i.e. with its own power supply) USB 3 hub.

Also, try what I said in this post (I know it's for a mice, but it's about the computer's USB power options, do what is applicable)

Also, last but not least, you can try a better file transfer software, in case the Win7 one is freaking out somehow.
I use FastCopy which has a crappy interface but is simple to use, but there is also Teracopy. Either is better and uses pretty much 0 resources when compared to doing a copy-paste.

Hmm thanks for the heads up. I'm going to reformat my computer in a few days, so we'll see if that changes anything (I doubt it). As for the USB settings, I've already done that too, and the problem persists =/

i recently had the same issue, i was moving a 280 gb folder from one external to another,
after a few tries of it disconnecting after copying about 30Gb i tried terra copy, and although it would still disconnect it would do it after about 140Gb , i was also able to continue with terra copy once i had reconnected the external ,it will ask to overwrite files already copied, i selected no. and it would continue where it left off, it would delete the file it was in the middle of copying when it disconnected then after it completed the entire copy it re copied that deleted file
give it a try if it works great, if not no harm done

some people have reported problems with terracopy so you could try
richcopy that gets decent reports too...

Free Utility: RichCopy, an Advanced Alternative to RoboCopy

Wow, so many different programs to replace the drag and drop haha. They all do the same thing right? Appreciate the info btw My problem is worse though: anything greater than 1GB, the file transfer will not complete. Even if it's a single file that's 1.2 GB or something.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

all those programs are better than windows's own file moving utilities (less ram and CPU used). In case it's a Win7 issue, try using them and see if they manage to complete the transfer.

 

[darknightz0117]

If anyone is still following this thread, I found something rather interesting.

I installed an SSD as my OS drive now, and installed the original hard drive that came with the laptop into an optical bay hard drive caddy to use as a storage drive. Now, when I move files from a USB 3.0 hard drive via the port, it will transfer successfully into the SSD (Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB), but will still disconnect when I transfer to the original hard drive (Seagate ST9750423AS 750GB). Yet, when I transfer from the SSD to the internal hard drive, no disconnects happen.

So to move my large files from my external, I have to first transfer to the Kingston SSD, and then transfer to the Seagate internal drive. Not too big a deal since speeds are insanely fast now. This kinda fixes my problem, but I'm still curious as to why I can't transfer from the external directly to the internal segate.

 

[greghig]

Found it. At Least for me.

Go Into the BIOS and turn off "LEGACY USB SUPPORT". (hopefully this is an option for you.

This solves ALL of my USB 3.0 problems and even is a little faster.

Good Luck.

 

[dream3]

Just wanted to let people know that I was able to fix my issues with external hard drives disconnecting mid transfer when using USB 3.0 ports. They worked fine in USB 2.0 though.

I've been having those problems since windows 7 up till windows 10, which is what I'm currently on.

So what I did first is to disable ALL sort of legacy USB support in my BIOS.
Then I made sure all my cables were seated properly and that drives were fully working on USB 2.0 ports.
After I went into device manager, found my portable drive and under properties > policies, I set them for full performance mode instead of "quick removal", and allowed write cache too.
Finally, in device manager, I uninstalled the intel USB 3.0 extension driver and restarted my computer. Turned it back on, device manager again > checked for drivers changes so it would automatically reinstall the intel USB 3.0 thing an DONE. No more issues at all.

 

[TVeblen]

Nice work. Congrats!

 

[Ryrynz]

I think you'll find that only one or two of those things will be the solution. Could you enable them one at a time and find out what ones actually fix the issue?

 

[jwprice]

Does the drive have a connector for auxiliary power? (It likely needs a power supply of 5 Volts and 1.5+ Amps) If not, you can try a powered (i.e. with its own power supply) USB 3 hub.

Also, try what I said in this post (I know it's for a mice, but it's about the computer's USB power options, do what is applicable)

Also, last but not least, you can try a better file transfer software, in case the Win7 one is freaking out somehow.
I use FastCopy which has a crappy interface but is simple to use, but there is also Teracopy. Either is better and uses pretty much 0 resources when compared to doing a copy-paste.

I just wanted to say thanks for the fastcopy option. I've been having issues with my 4TB WD drive. It didn't have problems until the drive was over half full. Now when ever copy/move transfer to or from it (mostly to or from another external drive, rarely does it happen with transferring to or from the internal) starts disconnecting. VLC playing a video/iso dvdr file works great. I switched out to a 2.0 usb micro-usb sync cable and still have the problem. Fastcopy was the only way I could transfer files to another external drive without moving my drive to another computer to do a transfer on. I know, it's time for a new pc (dv6704 model from the vista days still running xp)...Can't give up my video mirror mode on the NVidia GPU...

 

[Megahertz07]

USB 2.0 has a 480 M bits per second transfer rate, or 60 M Bytes per second transfer rate. I have a HDD USB 3.0 dock with a SATA 2 HDD. It begins with 220 b/s transfer rate (to disk ram cache) and slows down and stabilize at 35 b/s. The results are the same if I use USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 port. The bottle neck isn't the USB. The The bottle neck is the device (SATA 2 HDD). WD passport are even slower.