Get mouse & keyboard to work in Windows GUI, safe mode, and the bios

KT888 · 06 Oct 2016

How can I get it so my mouse and keyboard work in windows, safe mode, and the bios without denigrating the performance of my 20x3 to 8 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drives. I've seen out there that the performance of these devices is increased by disabling USB Legacy USB Support"

For example "Disable Legacy USB Support unless you need to use a USB keyboard in DOS, OS/2, or Linux"

However when I do disable Legacy USB support my USB mouse and keyboard don't work in safe mode.

Megahertz07 · 07 Oct 2016

Welcome to the forum.
Please edit your profile and add all hardware information so we can see it.
What you mean with 20 3-8 TB?
BIOS USB Legacy USB Support loads a BIOS driver so you can use Mouse and Keyboard prior of OS driver to load. Safe mode loads Windows without drivers so if you disable BIOS USB Legacy USB Support you wont have USB.
To increase USB performance you should attach your USB 3.0 HD to a different controller. For example, if you have USB 2.0 from your chipset use it for mouse and keyboard and use the USB 3.0 from a dedicate controller to the external HDD.

It doesn't matter if you connect your external HDD to USB 2.0, 3.0, or 3.1.
USB 2.0 has a 480 M bits per second transfer rate
USB 3.0 has a 5 G bits per second transfer rate
USB 3.1 has a 10 G bits per second transfer rate

I would say that your external HDD won't achieve 300 M bits per second transfer rate.
So the results will be the same if you use USB 2.0, 3.0 or USB 3.1 port. The bottle neck isn't the USB. The The bottle neck is the device (SATA HDD).

Eric3742 · 07 Oct 2016

KT888 said:

How can I get it so my mouse and keyboard work in windows, safe mode, and the bios without denigrating the performance of my 20 3-8 TB USB 3.0 HD. I've seen out there that the performance of these devices is increased by disabling USB Legacy USB Support"

For example "Disable Legacy USB Support unless you need to use a USB keyboard in DOS, OS/2, or Linux"

However when I do disable Legacy USB support my USB mouse and keyboard don't work in safe mode.

You may missed read this statement.

If you run in DOS, OS/2, or Linux; mode, you need to Disable Legacy USB Support.....for USB keyboard & mouse.
Each computer's USB ports are connected to the MB, which is not related to other USB ports.
Then you should enable Legacy USB Support to use USB keyboard & mouse in Windows Safe mode.

You are running Windows Safe mode, right!

Do note that USB mouse & keyboard should be using USB 2.0 separately.
If you are using a USB 3.0 hub, and connect both USB mouse and keyboard, any other devices connect to the same hub will be using USB 2.0 speed.
Also, for some devices require USB power, you need to slot the device's USB cable to USB 2.0 only.

As for USB Hub, try to get these USB Hub with separate power adapter to the power supply.
Using the computer for USB power supply, it may affect the performance.

KT888 · 14 Oct 2016

Megahertz07 said:

Welcome to the forum.
Please edit your profile and add all hardware information so we can see it.
What you mean with 20 3-8 TB?
BIOS USB Legacy USB Support loads a BIOS driver so you can use Mouse and Keyboard prior of OS driver to load. Safe mode loads Windows without drivers so if you disable BIOS USB Legacy USB Support you wont have USB.
To increase USB performance you should attach your USB 3.0 HD to a different controller. For example, if you have USB 2.0 from your chipset use it for mouse and keyboard and use the USB 3.0 from a dedicate controller to the external HDD.

It doesn't matter if you connect your external HDD to USB 2.0, 3.0, or 3.1.
USB 2.0 has a 480 M bits per second transfer rate
USB 3.0 has a 5 G bits per second transfer rate
USB 3.1 has a 10 G bits per second transfer rate

I would say that your external HDD won't achieve 300 M bits per second transfer rate.
So the results will be the same if you use USB 2.0, 3.0 or USB 3.1 port. The bottle neck isn't the USB. The The bottle neck is the device (SATA HDD).

Oh my friend you are soooo wrong. It makes a major difference when you're copying or moving a collection of files from one of these massive drives to another. USB 3.0 connectors transfer files from 2-3 times faster than a USB 2.0 connector with a USB 3.0 drive (In my own experience) I haven't even tried USB 3.1 yet since I've got a whack of USB 3.0 drives and there's just no reason in the world to buy 3.1 drives until there's actually something wrong with my 3.0 drives. But I'll get there and then I'll see what speed you can get out of the new standard.

KT888 · 14 Oct 2016

Eric3742 said:

KT888 said:

How can I get it so my mouse and keyboard work in windows, safe mode, and the bios without denigrating the performance of my 20 3-8 TB USB 3.0 HD. I've seen out there that the performance of these devices is increased by disabling USB Legacy USB Support"

For example "Disable Legacy USB Support unless you need to use a USB keyboard in DOS, OS/2, or Linux"

However when I do disable Legacy USB support my USB mouse and keyboard don't work in safe mode.

You may missed read this statement.

If you run in DOS, OS/2, or Linux; mode, you need to Disable Legacy USB Support.....for USB keyboard & mouse.
Each computer's USB ports are connected to the MB, which is not related to other USB ports.
Then you should enable Legacy USB Support to use USB keyboard & mouse in Windows Safe mode.

You are running Windows Safe mode, right!

Do note that USB mouse & keyboard should be using USB 2.0 separately.
If you are using a USB 3.0 hub, and connect both USB mouse and keyboard, any other devices connect to the same hub will be using USB 2.0 speed.
Also, for some devices require USB power, you need to slot the device's USB cable to USB 2.0 only.

As for USB Hub, try to get these USB Hub with separate power adapter to the power supply.
Using the computer for USB power supply, it may affect the performance.

I have separate mouse & keyboard transceivers.
My USB 2.0 Hub is plugged into a native USB 2.0 port on the MB.
The hub has it's own power adapter. (Even though it really doesn't need it)

Megahertz07 · 14 Oct 2016

KT888 said:

Oh my friend you are soooo wrong. It makes a major difference when you're copying or moving a collection of files from one of these massive drives to another. USB 3.0 connectors transfer files from 2-3 times faster than a USB 2.0 connector with a USB 3.0 drive (In my own experience) I haven't even tried USB 3.1 yet since I've got a whack of USB 3.0 drives and there's just no reason in the world to buy 3.1 drives until there's actually something wrong with my 3.0 drives. But I'll get there and then I'll see what speed you can get out of the new standard.

Yes, I may be wrong. My MB do have USB 2.0, 3.0 and a 3.1. I also have a USB case with a SATA 6 on it and I've measured the transferring speed from (read) the external SATA 6 to (write) my SSD SATA 6. You can see by the posted image that the transferring rate is much below the USB 2.0 transfer rate. And it is the same rate with USB 2.0, 3.0 and a 3.1 ports.
As you say you have a very fast device, could you please give us the it's specs and post here (as an attachment) a snap shot of the transferring rate?

KT888 · 14 Oct 2016

I'm lmao. You think 148MB/s is slow. I would be laughing all day long if I was getting that kind of transfer rate. You are WAY above USB 2.0 theoretical limits though you realize. it's 480 megabits which is only 60 Megabytes/s you're at 148 WITH SMALL FILES. Of course you are going to a SSD and that helps. I'm talking about transfers of 2 and 3TB from a huge usb drive to another huge usb drive not pushing the theoretical limits of the technologties and we're talking relative transfer rates in the real world. Not the theoretical limits "They Say" the devices can move things. Which is absolute nonsense in my experience.

I'm not sure why you think I was suggesting I've got this ultrafast device I wasn't meaning to do that. In my experience none of the USB drives I've bought (And I've got 20 of them and another 15 or so SATA drives from 3 to 8 TB) 2TB USB 2.0 or 3,4,5,8TB USB 3.0 drives and even including internal SATA 6 drives none of them come close to the mythical limits the official standard suggests however as I said on my system transfers between drives connected to USB 3.0 ports are 2-3 times faster than transfers between drives connected to USB 2.0 ports (NOT TEN TIMES as the standard states) and both are dismally slow with the fastest I've seen STARTING at around 100 MB/s (and decent file sizes. You know, episodes or movies) and usually settling around 50-60 max much less if it's a bunch of mp3s or jpgs then it would be more in the neighborhood 20-30 MB/s even on a USB 3.0 port. Maybe even lower.

And btw the specs on my systems are pretty impressive there's nothing lacking there. My 2 home systems are 4770K & 3770K on Asrock Z87 OC Formula/ac & Asrock Z77 Extreme9 with 32GB 2133MHz & 16GB 1600MHz RAM respectively powered by a EVGA 1000W SuperNOVA 80+ Platinum and a Corsair 860i 80+ Platinum and still transfer rates are UNIMPRESSIVE. I really don't know how to get better rates than that. I even tried Asrock's xfast USB technology but it was disappointingly nothing. IME
The theoretical limits for USB 3.0 transfers is so laughable I could get sick from lack of breathing 640MB/s is an ABSOLUTE JOKE. No one's getting that believe me. Even if you were talking from a SSD to a SSD I don't know what it would be but maybe 300-400 MB/s would be the fastest (And I HIGHLY doubt anyone's seeing that kind of sustained transfer rate on a large file transfer or copy). I know, I've seen when SSDs first became a thing where they were showing some numbers around 550 MB/s or so on the new SSDs but believe me no one's seeing that in real world scenarios and certainly not with any drives connected to a USB port. And believe me the "Theoretical limits" of the new USB 3.1 standard are going to turn out to be equally mythical if history is any indicator wait and see. In fact just saying that makes me realize how completely ridiculous it is that these standards people are literally suggesting that a MECHANICAL device with 3-8 platters and 6-14 heads can transfer information at the same rate as a ONE TB RAM Drive (Basically what a SSD is) that can move things at the speed of light (That's how fast electricity is) with no moving parts.

Now don't get me wrong we're talking current state of events here. I would be the last person to deny that processors going at 3.5 BILLION cycles per second is absolutely unbelievable with some GPU Processors I think even beating that (I owned one of the first Pentium 60's. You know, the one with the flaw in it)
But transfer rates between external devices aren't approaching those kind of Impossible but Real numbers. But still very impressive from a historical standpoint. I just don't know why they're suggesting these silly impossible numbers in the standards. I mean who do they think they're fooling. I guess until you buy one and see the reality they could be fooling the buying public.