I run a mix of windows 7 and windows 10, usb 3 and usb 2 ports.
Some ports are aftermarket addons to a desktop, and some come built into a laptop.
I have several of the external drives, when they are plugged to a USB2.0 port they operate as expected, but are not showing up in explorer when they are plugged into a usb3 hub or socket.
This happened over a period of time, depending on where its plugged in and if they are not the only drive on the hub. It is not a unique problem.
What seemed to fix it:
I did a windows update, took 12 hours total before it was done.
Still the drives don’t appear, so its not that.
I verify the drive is OK via a usb2 socket.
They are then moved over to a USB3 hub, and the
drivers for all the USB devices are reloaded as below:
Open device manager.
Scroll to USB serial bus controllers.
For each listed hub and host and root device right click,
update driver, choose drivers on pc,yes pick the one that is probably the only one listed…choose to install.
This driver should already be there but it reloads all the drivers.
This may re-enable a non working driver and it may need to reboot.
If asked to reboot do so.
I also found plugging a usb2 hub into a usb3 hub causes a fallback that allows the drives to appear.
Now ‘downgrade’ to a usb2.0 through a self powered hub, and plug that into the usb3 socket, it will still operate in usb2 mode.
Thats what I did to get these drives to be recognized via the usb 3 port.
Other devices seem unaffected in the way drives are.
If you have several drives on a powered hub and leave them in the same slot they seem to work well, also if they are running usb2 mode.
With these small portable drives unplugging them or replugging them in a different spot leads to them not being recognized…reloading the drivers seems to solve the problem.
Using the same ports for client hubs helps.
Removing each device one at a time helps.
Reinserting each device one at a time and allowing 20 seconds each helps.
The drivers/bios/firmware for usb3 needs more work to deal with this issue.
But I got drives to show up where they were not even detected before.
I did this on an Asus ROG laptop with 1-usb2
1-type C with a usb3 adapter
2-usb3 sockets
Chris
