Do USB 3.0 drives work for you?

[Fayez]

I am creating this poll in the hopes of getting QNAP's attention. There are many people, including me, who are experiencing zero functionality when it comes to using the USB 3.0 port with USB 3.0 drives. Using the USB 3.0 ports with USB 2.0 drives works fine.

A week after contacting support about this issue (which itself was disappointingly difficult), I was sent an RMA form for my TS-459 Pro II. I was told that this was a hardware issue. Instead of sending in a brand new device for repairs (or replacement, I guess), I just had a replacement shipped to me (for free via next day shipping) from Amazon. The replacement has the same problem. However, it also has a serial number that is sequentially lower than my first device, so it may be an older build. Unless I am just very unlucky (to have received another defective device):

1. This is indeed a hardware issue, and there is a bad batch of USB 3.0 controllers/QNAP NASes (or maybe all of them are bad?)
- OR -
2. This is a firmware bug that needs to be addressed by QNAP urgently

Anyway, I hate to keep ranting on and on about this issue, but I really do want QNAP to take notice and do something about this. And I'm sorry, but I don't buy the whole "hard drive manufacturers may not follow USB standards and test only for compatibility with Windows" argument that tries to redirect blame for this problem.

It may also be helpful to list the first few digits of your serial number to see if there is a trend. Here's my feedback:

Q117... & Q118... serial numbers: "No, but they used to work, worked only once, or do not fully work (e.g. disconnect after a while)"

Working intermittently (actually, it was only not recognized ONCE, otherwise working fine):
Patriot Supersonic 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Worked once, not at all any more:
Plugable USB 3.0 Dock (regardless of which hard drive; tried Hitachi 2.5" and Seagate 3.5" and 2.5" drives)
Oyen Digital USB 3.0 Enclosure (tried Hitachi and Seagate 2.5" drives)

I have zero issues with any drive on the USB 2.0 ports, or with the USB 3.0 ports on my laptop.

Please take a minute to respond to the poll even if you have not had any issues. Thank you!

[michielske]

I use this one with my ts459 pro II:

Icy Box IB-RD4320StU3 External RAID
Inside 2 2tb disks of hitachi in JBOD
This device never disconnects. I use it to make sheduled backups of my nas device.
The drives of the Icy box also going to sleep if you don't use them. When you acces the networkshare the spin up again.


The only issue that i have is when i reboot My qnap device i have to unplug the icybox once and then plugin again.
But my Qnap is on all the time so that's no issue for me.

[Jobsays]

Identical issue as this thread: http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=182&t=48624. Drive was recognized initially connected to the rear USB 3.0 port, I was able to schedule a backup job to it that was successful. Drive then disappeared about a day alter (assuming sleep timer had kicked in). I subsequently flashed the drive firmware to the version below and disabled the sleep timer, but no change. The drive works connected to a USB 2.0 port no problem. After several combinations of shutting down or rebooting the NAS, plugging, unplugging drive, I was able to get the drive recognized again. The winning combination seems to be as described in the tread above: power down the NAS with the USB cable disconnected, power on the NAS, connect drive USB cable after NAS has finished booting.

TS-459 Pro II, firmware 3.5.1 Build 1002T, external WD My Book Essential 3TB/USB3.0 model WDACW0030HBK-NESN (firmware 1.016) sleep timer set to never with SmartWare

[tilo]

No, not at all:
QNAP TS-659 PRO II Turbo FW: 3.5.0 Build 0815T
Model:
LaCie Minimus 1TB 7200RPM USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive for PC (has external power supply)
Manufacturer: Hitachi
Model: HCS5C1010CLA382

on USB 3.0 (front or back) doesn't get recognized but USB 2.0 right away.

[P3R]

I have a Hitachi 3 TB HUA723030ALA640 in a Icy Box IB-110StU3-B dock that's working well.
'

[ShireNetworks]

In general no on these QNAPs.

TS-459 Pro II
TS-559 Pro II

The drives that did work were:
WD My Book 1140 (2TB drive)
WDC WD20 EARX-00PASB0 (2TB drive)

I didn't get to test a TS-879U-RP before it went to site but suspect the same issue.

Similar symptoms are other posts, works on USB 2.0 but not USB 3.0 (either front or back)

QNAP's on latest firmware 3.6.0 but results were the same with older versions of the firmware.

Its a shame QNAP haven't fixed this as its the most significant drawback on the devices in our opinion.
Other functionality is quite good.

[harrysen]

Yes i have used USB 3.0 with my dell laptop which is well supported and fasted data transfer speed. USB 3.0 also have lower power consumption by the USB devices....

[CamTheSnapper]

I've got a Samsung 2TB Spinpoint F3/4EG EcoGreen HDD 32M in an Astone USB 3.0 case (http://www.astone.com.au/index.php?productID=44) and it's not working. Shows up as a device but when I try and start an external device backup it fails and the drive disappears from the QNAP web interface...

[2000wolf]

My Buffalo HD-HX2.0TU3 DriveStation 2TB works great.

It's "little 1 TB sister" Buffalo HD-HX1.0TU3 DriveStation is on the compatibility list:

http://www.qnap.com/pro_compatibility_usb.asp

My smaller USB 3.0 drive Transcend StoreJet M3 also works, however it takes some time until it is detected.

[mdamboldt]

I have had running two Verbatim 2 TB 3,5" external USB 3.0 devices (http://www.verbatim.com/prod/hard-drives/desktop/store-n-save-usb-3.0-sku-97580/ and http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/desktop/usb-3.0/) and two Revoltec cases (rs078 - Revoltec 3,5" Alu Book Edition 3 black) (http://www.revoltec.net/revoltec.net/index.php?StoryID=7&ArticleID=342&WorldID=4&websiteLang=en) where I used Samsung 2 TB HD204UI drives for a couple of month at my Qnap TS-459 Pro II system at USB 3.0 ports without any issue.

From my point of view the problems started to show up with the Firmware 3.5.2 builds. After the Firmware was deployed, the USB 3.0 devices don't show up in the Qnap menu when connected at the USB 3.0 port. But if I connect them to the USB 2.0 port, they will show up. Btw. when the USB 3.0 drive is connected and turned on beforehand the NAS starts, the HDDs are still recognized! But when you unplug it and reconnect while the NAS is already turned on, the HDD does not show up as external USB 3.0 device.

Some days ago I installed the latest Firmware 3.6.1 Build 0302T. But the USB 3.0 issue is still there. No hotplug is possible on USB 3.0 ports.

This was the situation till a few days back. Than I started to post at the forum and discussed the issue with a couple of other Qnap users. At the same time I filed an official service request to Qnap.
Right now, the whole USB 3.0 situation has changed again for me. I was just on the way to start debugging the issue and to get hold of kernel logs etc. than the USB 3.0 ports started to work again!!!

I'm sure I've not changed anything at the devices or it's configuration. - All my USB 3.0 HDDs are accidentally working again. I can hot plug them as often as I want to, they are always recognized again. Looks like the issue has gone magically!?!?

I will continue to monitor this issue and keep you posted.

regards, Martin

[Dannebrog]

My USB 3.0 HDD is not at all reliable. A lot of manual work involved, disconnect, reconnect, reboots, works for a while, then disconnected and get "Permission Denied" error on operations because its suddenly disconnected, at other times only in USB2 like mode with slow performance, new dicsonnect and reconnect and operations are fine for a while. VERY ANNOYING... The USB 3.0 HDD works fine, fast and reliable for weeks on Windows computers.

TS-879 Pro
Newest firmware 3.6.1 Build 0302T

The drive I use is:
Seagate FreeAgent Go Flex Desk 4TB HDD (STAC4000200)

This is really a drawback on the experience of the QNAP box, the issue should have highest attension at QNAP, both Support and development depts. I have reported the issue via the online support page a few weeks ago, and by direct mail to QNAP Support last week, but no reply received yet.

[2000wolf]

... VERY ANNOYING... The USB 3.0 HDD works fine, fast and reliable for weeks on Windows computers.
...

Regrettably that's exactly the point: Our NAS are no Windows computers. My impression is that the majority of USB drives are only tested on Win or Mac PCs but not on Linux systems.

My compatible Buffalo (mentioned earlier here) actually works like a charm. Nevertheless Qnap should update their compatibility list much more frequently.

Interestingly Synology's compatibility list ist much shorter than Qnap's: http://www.synology.com/support/faq_sho ... 3&lang=enu
... but they support the popular Western Digital drives. Maybe if I need more backup space I'll try a small Syno NAS as a backup solution for my Qnap just to test the Synology universe.

[Grisu]

We had big issues with a 2.5" 1TB Verbatim USB3.0 Disk. It got disconnected without any reason, sometimes in the middle of a backup job, which resulted in unreadable and undeletable files.

We are now using 3 rotating 1TB WD Elements Portable (2.5") for encrypted backups which work quite good. They are plugged in for a week and changed on Fridays. The only problem I had was some trouble while trying to unmount the disk one time. It simply didn't work. Since then it worked every time so far...

[photograjph]

On a 459 Pro II (3.6.1 Build 0302T), the goal was to use USB 3 to backup my NAS (I'm a photographer, so offsite/fireproof redundancy is pretty important). Tried 3 solutions over the last 4 months, with partial success:

- Soho Raid+ USB 3 Dual disk (HUR1-SU3S2) running in RAID 0, 2x2Tb - never worked at all on USB 3, but worked adequately on USB 2 with no disconnects. However, also quite slow transfer rates (3+ days to copy 3.5Tb);
- WD Passport 2Tb single disk - never worked at all on USB 3, but worked adequately on USB 2 with no disconnects;
- QNAP hardware-approved Astone ISO-RD230 USB 3 Dual bay running in RAID 0, 2x2Tb - this one was odd! Initially, it would disconnect within about 5 minutes, barely enough time to get a backup running. Even if the backup started in time, transfer activity was not enough to keep the drive alive before disconnect. Got tired of the disconnects pretty quickly, so SSH onto the QNAP, run dmesg and get (among other things):
---
xhci_hcd 0000:05:00.0: WARN: Stalled endpoint
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdq] Unhandled sense code
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdq] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdq] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdq] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdq] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 46 a8 b3 60 00 00 10 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sdq, sector 1185461088
---
usb 9-1: Device not responding to set address.
usb 9-1: device not accepting address 0, error -71
hub 9-0:1.0: cannot disable port 1 (err = -32)
---

That has all the hallmarks of a driver issue, based on various other forum posts about xhci_hcd errors. However, I decided to be completely random and try an old Unix trick to try and stop the disconnects - I did a very easy "cd /share/external/sdq1" as soon as the device showed up once I plugged it in. On Linux, a drive shouldn't dismount/disconnect if it is locked in use, and doing a "cd" to the path makes the OS think it is being used.

Once I did that, I kicked off a full backup through the QNAP interface - and 11 hours later, all 3.5Tb successfully copied without a single disconnect. I have a variety of theories about why disconnects might happen (including "green" firmware on drives), but that's a discussion for another day and this method happened to work for me. I'm not convinced QNAP hardware requires RMA (which they offered me previously), but I had better luck with the Astone QNAP-approved device than I have with anything else (and it was only $60 for the chassis).

Even though my trick worked, the backup speeds were well short of USB 3 theoretical max (and real world as well) - I got 85 megabytes/second average over 11 hours (theoretical is around 600 megabytes/second, and real world is closer to 280 megabytes/second) - still, it's faster than USB 2 and I'm only using this method once a month for backups so I can tolerate it until new firmware resolves what are clearly driver bugs that appear to affect both stability and transfer performance.

[2000wolf]

Hi there,

my Intenso Memory Case 1TB (6,4 cm (2,5 "), 5400rpm, 8MB Cache, USB 3.0) works like a charm.

http://www.intenso.de/produkte_en.php?k ... 1308731404