Syba USB 3.0 Flash Card-Reader Disconnecting every 3-minutes!

Hello. I have a brand new Syba SY-HUB50044 SD card-reader and USB 3.0 Hub. This device is an internal USB 3.0 Hub, plus a SD card-reader. It gets power from an internal molex/sata connector, and connects to your motherboard's USB 3.0 via either the 20-pin header or a USB 3.0 cable out the back of the case to a rear-panel USB 3.0 port. It provides two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port and the SD/SDHC/SDXC card-reader.

There was firmware update to the USB 3.0 Hub (mfg by Via), which I applied without issue.

I have no issues with the front USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. However, I am having a weird problem with the card-reader. Exactly every three minutes, the reader disconnects, then immediately re-connects. I can hear the windows tones "de-dum", "de-dah", as the device disconnects, then connects again. With device manager open, you can see "USB Mass Storage Device" go away, then reapper under the "Universal Serial Bus Controllers" section. If you have a SD card plugged in, and an explorer window open, it will close, as it the card has been effectively removed.

Under the "Disk Drives" section of Device Manager, the card is labelled as a "Generic STORAGE DEVICE USB Device". Microsoft installed a generic driver dated 6/21/2006: 3.1.7600.13685.

I have tried uninstalling the device, then re-installing. I have tried un-installing the driver, then re-installing. All to no avail. There are no actual drivers provided for the card-reader, they have been automatically found by windows. If I could find the manufactuer of the card-reader, maybe that will help, but Syba has not been very helpful in me debugging the issue.

I tried the device in another computer, and it works fine! I used to have a different card-reader installed in this computer, so perhaps it is getting stuck using the old driver? Anyways, very frustrating.

Layback Bear said:

Can you find the old program and or driver and remove them. Then turn off the computer and install the new card and boot and let Windows 7 pick it up.

It was a Rosewill USB 2.0 card-reader. There were no drivers or programs for that reader as well, as windows found them automagically. I am speculating about an old driver being used by accident.

I think this disconnecting/connecting every three-minutes is the weird thing. What sort of timer would there be in windows? It is out there scanning devices?

Layback Bear said:

I know of no such timer in Windows 7 but others might. Have you checked in bios and see if their is some kind of timer.
This might be of some help.
USB Selective Suspend - Turn On or Off

Thanks for the link. Kind of makes sense, but I gave it a shot and it made no difference.

Thought I would update this post, as I discovered the problem. Turns out, I had installed a program called Windows Smart 2012 a while back. This program is constantly checking your hard-drivers, and using SMART data to predict drive failure. If I uninstalled the program, the SD card would stop disconnecting. Once I re-install the program, the SD card would disconnect every three minutes. I wasn't really using the program, so I just left it uninstalled for now, and forwarded this problem I was having to the developer of the program. There is an option in the program to disable checking on a certain drive, but it doesn't prevent the SD card disconnects.

Whew!

Hi, Thank you so much for posting the solution here. I have been struggling for the last two days to figure out what is happening in my laptop. I connect my multi-card reader to my laptop with a compact flash card inserted, it shows up some times after power cycling the card reader and disconnecting the usb cable to the card reader, but then it would disappear after about 8 mins. It actually started happening recently. I tried several things in my laptop with USB power setting etc. Nothing helped. Then I found this post by doing google for several hours with different keywords. Yes!! I had that damn software installed (Windows SMART 2013) recently to check some hard drive SMART status. Never thought that would cause this problem.
A BIG THANKS TO YOU FOR POSTING THIS SOLUTION!!!

Glad I could help someone! I emailed the developer as mentioned in a previous post, but never got a response back. Perhaps your laptop uses the same controller that the Syba device has? Or maybe the software is buggy with card-readers. Either way, I no longer have it installed. I found a program called Hard Disk Sentinel that does the same thing, and has a nice GUI.