USB 3.0 For WHS

[Commodore]

Has anyone been successful in adding a USB 3.0 PCI Express card to a Windows Home Server? I am trying to install a Rosewill USB 3.0 card and a Thermaltake Blac X 5G USB 3.0 drive bay to my home build. Using the v2.0.4.0 driver I can get the USB 3.0 drive to be recognized and usable but after several minutes it disconnects. Any ideas?

[pcdoc]

Yes, I have tried a couple of boards and they work great. We discuss it a bit in BYOB 15 as well as the original article I wrote. The bottom line is that it works great and is the perfect match for WHS for either BDBB backup or drive pool storage without the suffering slow performance of the USB 2.0 and the ill tempered behavior of eSata. Go for it you will not be disappointed.

 

 

 

http://homeservershow.com/byob-episode-15.html

 

http://homeservershow.com/is-usb-3-0-worth-it.html

[mrossco]

Has anyone been successful in adding a USB 3.0 PCI Express card to a Windows Home Server? I am trying to install a Rosewill USB 3.0 card and a Thermaltake Blac X 5G USB 3.0 drive bay to my home build. Using the v2.0.4.0 driver I can get the USB 3.0 drive to be recognized and usable but after several minutes it disconnects. Any ideas?

 

Had a similar issue, and it turns out I was not getting enough power to the drive, causing the driver to crash. Make sure the power supply that came with your Thermaltake bay has the external power connected and is working properly. Also check the power connection on the Rosewill card.

[pcdoc]

Surprising. I have the 5G and have had no issues with it. I have it plugged in to the same UPS as my server and it has been running great.

[Commodore]

This is a follow up to my initial USB 3.0 dock issue and the solution I used to resolve it.

 

The first thing I did was to ensure I had the latest USB 3.0 firmware and driver for the NEC/Renesas host controller. As of today, the latest firmware is version 3.0.2.5 and the latest driver is version 2.0.4.1. You can check the firmware level with the UBS 3.0 utility that installs with the USB 3.0 driver. Firmware update installers can be found using Google if the USB 3.0 card vendor does not have them as they all appear to use the same installer and firmware. Some if not all motherboards with the NEC/Renesas host controllers can be firmware updated with the same utility. Most USB 3.0 card vendors have at least driver version 2.0.4.0 available for download.

 

Once I had everything up to specification I was able to see the USB 3.0 attached drive in drive manager however I found formatting drives to still be a problem. Using WHS Disk Mangement or Server Storage in the WHS Console resulted in format failures. The answer was to format the drive in my Windows 7 system prior to use and skip the Server Storage formatting option when adding the USB 3.0 attached server backup drive.

 

This worked even for a WD 2TB Advanced Format drive which is what I am using now for my USB 3.0 connected backup drive. In this case no jumpers are needed and the WD Align utility is not required. Using Disk Management I initialized and formatted the Advanced Format drive on my Windows 7 system and the WHS USB 3.0 dock immediately recognized it and I successfully added it for server backup to my WHS.

 

Backups are significantly faster with USB 3.0 and the WD Green 2TB Advanced Format drive is extremely quiet.

Edited October 29, 2010 by Commodore

[mrossco]

Awesome! This is good info. Thanks for posting.