Is a USB 3 stick not always a USB 3?

[Darth Vader]

Strange one is this. My new PC with the latest ITX X299 chipset doesn't mount my Kingston DataTraveller USB 3.0 stick under Unbuntu 16.04 LTS. This is a fairly old stick and newer USB sticks from Kingston, Transcend and Sandisk all work. This same stick works fine in any of my older laptops. I spent a couple of hours looking into this and when I monitored the port scanning I see that the USB stick is recognised and all expected info is in there. Then it seems to time out and shuts down the port and after a while rescans and opens up the stick again and so over and over. Tried the second front USB port with the same results. So I try the rear ports but since they are a pain to reach I connected an old USB2 extension cable and lo the USB stick is mounted! This only works for my 4 rear USB 3 ports and not the front two.

Anywho cutting a long story short it transpires that if I plug the stick into any my 6 USB 3 ports it doesn't mount but it will if connected to this 1.5M USB cable! Then I try a USB3 hub but no luck Now USB 3 cable has 9 leads whilst a USB2 has just 4 or 5. So it seems to me that although the DataTraveller is sold as USB 3.0 and does have the blue plastic thingummybob in its plug its only working in USB2 mode???

Cheers,

DV

 

[cliddell]

I had a similar experience with a USB "3.0" external HDD case. It turned out it had actually been made based on a draft USB 3.0 spec, not the finalized spec, and something had changed that meant anything that tried to use it as 3.0 didn't work.

It could also be a bug in the Linux USB 3.0 implementation, that some detail of the Kingston's implementation trips over. Or it could be a bug in the Kingston's USB 3.0 implementation that the Linux device driver happens to trip over.

I would guess a company like Kingston might have support forums, and Ubuntu certainly have them, I'd search and possibly enquire on there.

 

[zippy]

Similar with my wife's HP laptop - my Corsair USB3 stick only works in one of the 3 USB-C ports, but is fine on my desktop PC.

Sorry but no idea why, except that it seems to me to be the sockets not the stick itself.

 

[slavedata]

Interesting that. I have applied mods to CD players,Jogglers and a Humax box that require booting from a USB stick. They often will only work on an old less than 2Gb stick formatted to FAT32.

 

[davidsrsb]

There are a lot of fake Kingston sticks out there.

 

[gintonic]

could be a fake, or could be the machine/stick/OS are not 100% compliant with the USB3 spec. USB3 is quite a high speed and "aggressive" protocol, and all it takes is one element (inc, the cable) to be marginally non-compliant and the whole lot will fail. In our student labs we have the greatest problem with this running on almost every form of Linux we use. Win10 gives us far fewer but a not-zero problems. We don't use Apple products so I cant comment.

 

[Darth Vader]

After a bit more playing about its an Ubuntu problem. The mobo X299E-ITX is very new and only comes with Windoze drivers. If I boot into Windoze 10 pro all 6 USB ports do recognise this Kingston G4 whereas Ubuntu 16.04 exhibits the above strange behaviour. Perhaps in a couple of years time they may have a fix but at least I have a work around. Its an early USB 3 stick anyway but I can at least grab data off these if necessary. I also have an issue with a new printer that I installed today. Windoze 10 immediately recognised and installed it but Ubuntu doesn't yet have any drivers for it. Its no problem for me as I have Windoze 10 pro running in a VM under Ubuntu and I can print from there just fine.

I think Apple may have a similar problem. If I run OS X or macOS in a VM neither iTunes nor Finder will recognise an iThingy if I tell the O/S (correctly) that I have USB3 ports. As with Ubuntu the devices will appear on the USB3 bus and correctly identified but not accessible. If I falsely set USB to type 2 then these device are appear on the USB2 bus and everything springs to life.

I first noticed this behaviour on my late 2012 Mac mini where my USB3 ports are shown on the machines USB2 bus.

Cheers,

DV

 

[gintonic]

you seem to have a problem with your spell checker.

 

[cctaylor]

Interesting that. I have applied mods to CD players,Jogglers and a Humax box that require booting from a USB stick. They often will only work on an old less than 2Gb stick formatted to FAT32.

That I believe is due to the ancient operating systems on these devices. No point looking in the manuals for help as they were written before large USB sticks became available. My last Skoda Octavia had a limit on the size of SD card it could access on infotainment system.

Makes sense to keep a smaller USB stick for this eventuality.

 

[Whaleblue]

Anywho cutting a long story short it transpires that if I plug the stick into any my 6 USB 3 ports it doesn't mount but it will if connected to this 1.5M USB cable!

So, this is a stealth cable thread!

Mods, this should be moved to Audio where it can be “considered” at length.