People with Elitebook 8770W or simillar [Dose your USB3 ports work?]

I am asking this because I want to know if this is a common problem or if my laptop is defective !
For some time (almost a year) I am having problems with my 2 USB3 ports on the left side of the laptop. Some of my external hard disks (all of them WD) are not working and as soon as they get detected by windows (10) they get disconnected and reconnected all the time. If I use a USB2 cable then the HDD will work! If I connect two hard disks on the usb3 ports to copy from one to another always one is detected as USB2 and speeds are very slow. Another hard disk works in the USB3 slot (with usb3 cable) but it is detected as USB2!

If I knew that USB3 Board is defective I could buy one on ebay and replace it! But I am not sure! Also I suspect that by using a bad usb cable (one that was bent by accident and that I unbent with a screwdriver) I may have damaged the USB port.

Anyway I would really appreciate if you could help me figure out what's wrong and help me get this fixed as I still love this laptop and it's working perfect after all these years.

 

My ports work fine with an external Toshiba HDD.
I do have some questions though, in order for me to troubleshoot this.
Have you tried on another computer to replicate this behavor? Do those WD enclosures use a dedicated powersupply or are they connected by a single cable? Does this behavor happen with both 3.0 ports? And have you tried a different USB 3.0 cable for the HDD?
If I read this correctly, this behavor started somewhere last year with the same drives, right? Did you always use the same external WD drives before that?

If I were you, I would always start with the cheapest (free) options to troubleshoot and see from there.

If this behavor is only observed on your HP then I would look if its something to do with a USB 3.0 driver or some power saving mode by Windows 10. If all of that checks out then I would start disassembling the keyboard and the palmrest to gain access to the USB I/O board and do a visual inspection. Does it look dusty, does something look burnt / missing, or are there any foreign objects resting on the chips? Also, unscrew it from the base and disconnect it from the motherboard and check if the bus between the I/O pcb and motherboard has no burn marks.
If everything looks like it should from factory (minus the dust ) then it could be a defective I/O board. Those do go around $20 on eBay.

 

I don't know if it is common, but I have had similar issues on my 8770w. In my case, the ports completely stopped responding (no drives or devices would detect through these ports).

I would try the steps @Simmytu mentioned first to rule out a driver issue. If that doesn't help, just try replacing the board since they are relatively cheap. In my case, I purchased a new USB3 board for it on ebay and replaced it the last time I did a full teardown of the laptop. USB3 ports both work fine now and at the rated speed.

 

well. i can connect external usb to the right side sub2.0 ports too... it is not detected on the left side.... but printer, scanner, phone, and other devices can be detected

 

The USB ports on the right-hand side of one of my 8740w's used to be flaky about connecting successfully, but the problem went away somehow a long time ago!