USB3.0 cards & drivers, now mobo SATA and USB problems

[Charlie98]

Reference DESK in sig below.

About 6 months ago, I added a 2x USB3.0 PCIe adapter card to my PC, downloaded the included Renesas driver, and everything was fine. Because I wanted to use the USB3.0 front port on my case, I got a PCIe adapter card that has a USB3.0 header as well. I uninstalled the Renesas driver, pulled the old card, installed the new card, booted up, and installed the VIA chipset driver and... well, everything works, just not very fast. With the exception of my SSD, ALL of my drives are experiencing abysmal performance... these include a 1TB Barracuda on the SATA 1 mobo header, and any of the external USB drives plugged in anywhere on the mobo or case.

I went and pulled the new card, uninstalled the VIA driver, updated the USB3.0 mobo driver (and any other driver I could see an updated version for) but no go... nothing (except the SSD) will read or write over 110MB/s, most far less than that (tested with ATTO.)

This isn't really my area of expertise... before I go and really screw something up, does anyone have any ideas where I need to start?

 

[VirtualLarry]

First of all, do you have some saved benchmark comparisons, with which to make an objective comparison?

Doesn't ATTO do filesystem read/write tests? Meaning, if the disks are more filled than when you ran ATTO the last time, then it may be measuring a slower part of the disks.

 

[Charlie98]

Not really... I run ATTO every so often just to make sure they are working well, nothing ever seemed out of the ordinary until now.

I have one portable running at 55MB/s and the other at 30MB/s. The internal Barracuda is running at about 90MB/s.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I know back in the XP days, if Windows detected disk errors, it would ratchet down transfer rates, and you would have to edit the registry, or have to delete your disk controller drivers in device manager and have them re-detected. That may be risky, however.

Edit: Have you run a benchmark with HDTune, rather than ATTO? That will give you a device-level read benchmark, and you can compare speeds to published specs.

 

[Charlie98]

HDTune mimics what I found with ATTO...

 

[THRiLL KiLL]

so to be clear, right now, you have no usb3 cards connected and the system is running slow.

what motherboard do you have?

 

[Ketchup]

so to be clear, right now, you have no usb3 cards connected and the system is running slow.

what motherboard do you have?

Giga Z68MA-D2H-B3

 

[Ketchup]

I wish you had my board, it has a couple 3.0 ports from the Etron controller. Don't know why those were so difficult to find from the Intel controller though, but I'm sure future chipsets have remedied that.

 

[Charlie98]

I wish you had my board, it has a couple 3.0 ports from the Etron controller. Don't know why those were so difficult to find from the Intel controller though, but I'm sure future chipsets have remedied that.

No, it's got 2 mobo USB3.0s using the Etron controller... I updated the driver as well. Those are running as slow as any of the other ports. And, to reiterate, even the internal HDD, plugged into the SATA #1 port, is running slow.

so to be clear, right now, you have no usb3 cards connected and the system is running slow

Correct... I have pulled both cards and uninstalled both the Renesas and VIA drivers.

 

[Charlie98]

Here's what I'm talking about...

L to R: Internal .12 Barracuda on Intel SATA 3.0 port, 5400RPM external on mobo Etron controlled USB3.0 port, 7200RPM external on mobo USB2.0 port.



For comparison, my Plextor M5P on the SATA #0 header...

 

[VirtualLarry]

The USB 3.0 drives look slow, but the SATA drives look fine.

Seems like some shim driver got loaded into the USB (3.0) driver stack that is slowing them down?

 

[Charlie98]

The USB 3.0 drives look slow, but the SATA drives look fine.

Seems like some shim driver got loaded into the USB (3.0) driver stack that is slowing them down?

No... the Barracuda is on a SATA port, too.

I'm sure it's a driver issue, but I've reinstalled the Gigabyte USB drivers and I still am having problems.

 

[Charlie98]

Got my new M500 120GB SSD today, for my new build. Just to have a little fun with it, I put it in my desktop system... my Boot drive is the C drive M5Pro on port 0, the Crucial is the Z drive on port 1...



Now I'm completely at a loss...

To make matters worse, I need to update the FW, but the Crucial utility says I don't have a drive that needs updating.

 

[Cerb]

Those performance numbers look fine for the M500 at 120GB.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5593/crucial-m500-120gb-ssd-review/index4.html

As to firmware, if it does need newer, you might want to change to IDE mode and try again.

 

[Charlie98]

Those performance numbers look fine for the M500 at 120GB.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5593/crucial-m500-120gb-ssd-review/index4.html

As to firmware, if it does need newer, you might want to change to IDE mode and try again.

Jeepers... you're right. :| Guess I'll stick this in my daughter's laptop and reclaim my refurb 256GB 840Pro...