Weak USB drives

Guys,

I have a M18x R2 the all the usb ports are weak meaning I can plug a thumb drive in and usually it works if it requires very little power like a flash drive under 32gb. I have a couple 64 gb drives and a powered Ext HHD and a portable one. The portable HHD and the 64gb drives give me troubles to with power issues.

Any ideas?

 

It shouldn't be that way with any USB flash drive because they don't use much power. A USB hard drive is going to have more power draw because you're spinning up the platters, moving the read/write head, etc. I've had issues like you're describing, but it was the USB HDD, and I got rid of it.

I'm not sure what to tell you as far as fixing the issue because it's every port on the laptop, according to your post.

A work-around is an externally powered USB hub, but I would rather see you find the actual issue and get it fixed.

 

The only time I have ever run into a problem with the M18xR1 or M18xR2 of this nature is while trying to use a 3.5" desktop HDD in a USB enclosure. Those require additional power. I've not had any issue with 2.5" notebook HDDs or SSDs in a USB enclosure. I have, however, had issues with the USB 3.0 ports on the 18 not having adequate power as well as having them just randomly stop functioning altogether when running on battery power. (This occurs even with the option to let Windows turn them off to save power being disabled in Device Manager.)

 

Yeah its weird! I don't know... I noticed it after having to use an external wifi card for a while. I think that it may have weaken the ports. The Wifi card worked good for a while but constanly downloading/streaming movies a week later it started giving me issues. I bought a different ext wifi card, immediately the same thing it kept fail to keep a connection. I then moved to a access point for my Internet issues. Wearing out the usb's? I don't even know if that's possible. But I'm investing a lot of money in it to upgrade to the 980m sli I figured I should address this issue. Right now I'm just using a power usb hub for everything. I'm also hoping its some how a driver issue and when I install WIN 8 it will kind clean slate everything. I usally reinstall windows semi annually but I haven't done that in a long time on my laptop.

I think about swapping Motherboards or something but I want to know it will fix the problem before I buy.

 

What happens if you plug in multiple low power devices? How do the devices react on other systems?

 

Everything works in my on the go laptop so it's not the thumb drives or anything. I just downloaded an app to my phone it's called Ampere and I have a Note 4. it says I'm getting around 700 mA from each usb port. That sounds about right I think. Can anyone confirm?

 

Is the machine working on high performance? Are you using the battery only?