Z600 Incompatibility with USB 3.0

[photowriters]

Compuer details:

Z600

24GB RAM

4TB internal drive space

VANTEC UGT-PCE430-4C USB 3.0 Card (Renesas host controller)

External Harddrive Western Digital WDWBBGB0040HKB-NA (4TB)

External Harddrive Segare 1DXAP3-500 (3TB)

Both drives work on 2.0 port but on 3.0 port drive displays root directory, but will not read or write any files, and all computer operations slow to a crawl .

FWIW, Siig USB 3.0 multi card reader SIIGA9V1450X works perfectly

For the HP god of the Internet support forum, if this is not in the right place. please let me know.

[photowriters]

Addendum to original post.

transfer rate to external hard drive is currently 4.16 MB/sec. That means it will take 23+ hours to backup one drive.

[wb2001]

@photowriters,

Unhappily you have several issues:

1) internal hard drive SATA port is SATA300, and the MB/sec is slower than USB3 speeds. You can test the actual internal speed of the hard drive with HD Tune 255. It's 1/2 way down the page.

IF you had asked prior to the external drive purchase, I would have recommended an Esata external unit(s), with an appropriate Esata card.

[photowriters]

Obviously I was not clear enough.

I do not expect a 3.0 USB board in a Z600 to have the design through put of the 3.0 spec, but I did expect it to both be faster than hooking the drive through a 2.0 port and not lock the system up. There is an apparent incompatibility between the Z600 and the "standard" 3.0 USB interface. I have tried three different boards and none of them have worked worth a **bleep** with any external 3.0 device.

I will search the HP web sites for a generic HP USB 3.0 driver, but knowing how HP does business, I doubt I will find one. I love the Z600 especially the ease of access and maintainability, the 3.0 problems with a PCIe card are a real PITA.

[SDH]

The key is getting the right card, and the right drivers, and the correct PCIe slot to put the card into so you get full bandwidth for the card via that PCIe pathway.

HERE  is the post I wrote a while back, and I have these specific HP cards working perfectly in multiple Z600 and Z400, and xw6600 workstations:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/Add-HP-USB-3-0-car...

HP dropped any NEC/Renasus USB3 card a long time ago.

The HP card I use, a "2x2" (2 front, 2 rear ports) card, is based on the same Texas Instruments chip that HP integrated onto the motherboard of the ZX20 series of workstations, so it is easy to get the drivers for the card by going to the HP Z620 drivers site, for example.  They work great, and we have used them for years.  Recent updates of some of our Z600s to W10Pro64 FCU showed that HP and Microsoft are still supporting these..... they installed perfectly, automatically, during clean installs of that W10 recent update.

Regarding eSATA.  I like that also, but you don't need a card for it.  The ZX00 series of workstations has an option in BIOS to change a regular SATA port (port 4 or port 5, or both) to eSATA settings and then you just need a good adapter for the backplane.  I've posted in here on that too, and I generally only convert the last port (6th SATA port is called SATA port 5).  I run a single eSATA port on the backplane, and that is very handy and fast for doing image captures of OS installs and reload of the internal drives from those images when cloning installs.  The default speed for eSATA is 3.0 Gbps and we've used this also for years now.  Every one of our HP workstations has this in place on the backplane because it is so handy and fast to use.

Of interest, the chipset on the Z400/600/800 motherboards supports hot swapping of eSATA, but none before or after that.  That is handy too.... you don't need to shut down to add or remove eSATA drives.  You remove them properly as you should do for a thumb drive.... and you just plug them in to your running system to add.

[photowriters]

SDH,

Thanks for the information. Working with the board manufacturer, I learned that the Vantec UGT-PCE430-4C card will not work in a PCIe Gen2 slot. I moved things around and put the board in slot 3 (a PCIe Gen1 slot), uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, and the board now works, but file transfer is not much faster than plugging the drive into a USB 2.0 slot.

I really cannot accurately measure the throughput rate because I do not have a massive, coherent, non-segmented file to transfer from an internal to an external drive. but at least the system is not freezing up when the drive is plugged into card.

For what it is worth, none of the Vantec documentation said anything about the card not working in a PCIe Gen 2 slot.

Roger on the hot swaping. I haven't worked with a Z800, but the Z600 is a piece of cake to install and swap drives. I bought three Z600s when MicroCenter had refurbished units on sale for $595. Bumping the memory up to 24GB, adding 4TB of storage, etc. ran the price up, but the computer is still one hell of a fine job of engineering. It reminded me of what I expect from German manufacturing.

I'll have to look for your post on the details of using port 6 (5) as an entry into eSATA. It sounds interesting.

I wish I had an HP supported USB 3.0 card to compare against the Renasus chipped Vantec card. I am not seeing the speed gain I expected. I guess I would say it works, but the problem is not really solved.

[SDH]

With the newest BIOS the Z600 eSATA utilization is as easy as just plugging in the interface cable so you have eSATA on the backplane.  Plug and play.

I did speed testing with that HP Texas Instruments based card when it was plugged into the lower PCIe x16 "video" slot in the xw6600, and later in the Z400 and Z600 (version 2 for each) when the card was plugged into one of their PCIe generation 2 slots.  Full USB3 speeds..... very fast, unlike your experience.

Time to do what HP did..... junk that NEC/Renasus card and move up.  You discovered something that others did not.... the reason what that NEC/Renasus card was so slow.  It is running at 1/2 the speed that a PCIe card placed in a PCIe generation 2 slot can.  I guess that means you got maybe USB2.5?

[photowriters]

As the ad on TV says, "But wait! There's more!"

The Vantec folks think it is something to do with an ASC setting. I'm not sure what that is, but they say:

****************

Ya, 14+ hours to copy 80GB is slower than USB 2.0 speed. That is way too slow.

I still think it has something to do with ACS because this card with the 4 Renesas chipset requires a switching controller that works with the PCIe bus mainly on Xeon motherboard. If HP does not offer this function in the system BIOS, it could be the cause.

I would try using a USB 3.0 addon card that has only 1 controller (not 4), it will not need the switching and it should be fine. Good luck.

****************

I looked at the HP manuals and did not find anything related to ASC. That doesn't mean it's not there, but I didn't see it.

Regards,

Bob