External Gen 3 M.2 NVME Drive Causing USB Keyboard and Mouse Failures

[JohnAb]

Hello,

I have an external M.2 NVME enclosure (Orico, 10Gbps) containing a 1TB Gen 3 Samsung drive that sometimes causes my USB connected keyboard and/or mouse to become non-responsive when it is connected. It never causes a blue screen or crash, but about 30% of the time I will need to reconnect my keyboard and/or mouse to get them working again. When the issue occurs, mostly the keyboard and/or mouse will stop working straight away, but sometimes it occurs after a few minutes. Most of the time it doesn't happen at all. When the Samsung drive was mounted on the motherboard it always behaved perfectly.

This can happen if I connect the external drive either via a 10Gbps (USB 3.2) powered USB hub, to the type C port or to a front panel connected USB port. It doesn't happen if I connect any other external drive. No other USB connected devices cause an issue either and I have a lot of those.

Does anybody else see this behaviour? It might (as I suspect) be an issue with the external enclosure, but I wanted to ask the question. All of my drivers are up to date on my Z690 Hero motherboard, apart from the BIOS which is still on 1601. I have no other issues or errors at all, just this one.

If nobody else has experienced this, then I will just accept that it's most likely the external enclosure not playing nice. Thanks in advance for any insights. It would be helpful if you can confirm that you don't have an issue with an external NVME enclosure. In itself, that would probably indicate a faulty enclosure rather than some other cause. Thanks.

[ilnickif]

i have kind of similar problems with USB devices however not related to external drive - under WIN 11 ONLY - WIN 10 everything is OK
what system do you have?

[JohnAb]

Hi ilnickif,

I am on Windows 11 and now that you come to mention it, I had USB issues on my last machine too, also Windows 11. Those problems would cause a total freeze of all USB devices which could often not be recovered. Then I would have to restart by holding the power button, sometimes twice a day. In the end, after weeks of eliminating every BIOS setting and hardware fault I could think of (I even replaced the PSU and USB hub), I did track down what seemed to be a faulty USB cable and the faults were much better after I replaced it, but never went away completely.

It was not always like that - for a couple of years that PC was perfect. Like you, those issues were not related to external drives either, they would just occur randomly it seemed. But, now I'm starting to think that the issues probably started around the time that I upgraded to Windows 11 as a fresh install. I never considered that Win 11 might have been involved, so what you say could be very helpful. Trouble was, at a similar point in time I also upgraded to a Gigabyte BIOS that could not be rolled back, so I assumed it was most likely BIOS related at the time and eventually traded in the machine for this one.

The current faults could also be related to my keyboard/mouse (both Steel Series), but I think not, because I get no other faults on this machine until I plug in that external NVME drive.

Perhaps Win 11 is not as resilient as Win 10 for coping with USB faults? I'm just thinking it seems possible and would fit with my experience too.

Can you think of anything that might have triggered your USB problems in Win 11 and what symptoms did you get? I'd love to get to the bottom of this! Thank you.

[ilnickif]

I tell you what was a situation :

i bought new MB ROG Z690 Strix and processor - 12900 series but a dont remember what EXACT type of processor 64 GB DDR5 and 3090 Video card.

my old system was working under win 10. when i installed new hardware, i was affraid that i had to reinstal windows up front because new hardware was much different than old. however after little longer first boot everything was PERFECT ( under windows 10). i stay with this system about 3-4 weeks and upgraded to win 11 everything seems to be ok but i had occasionaly system shut off related to USB activities - plug in, plug out mouse movement ( no BSOD just like somebody cut off the power) , one moment some of my USB devises- mouse and keyboard - on certain ports stopped working in WIN 11 (in BIOS mode those devices and ports were working OK).Also there weere problems in Device meneger with some usb related devices. After doing some magic ( not sure what exactly) i was able to clear those problems but they returned.
Then i did clear reinstal of win 11 and drivers and updated to 1720 bios( driveres were from ROG web page NOT FROM THE FORUM). still problems - NO BSOD shut offs of system - problems in dev man. etc.
After 2 days of fight i returned to WIN 10 - ALL PROBLEMS ARE GONE .

please remember that problems with not working USB devices were ONLY in win 11 - those devices where working PERFECTLY in BIOS mode (before system starts)

personally what i am planing is to stay with win 10 as long as there will not be a new BIOS for my MB and new version of WIN 11 and will try updata again, but i will take drivers from ROG forum.


F.

[JohnAb]

Interesting thanks. Based on your experience, I might try a fresh install of Windows 10 as an experiment. If my USB issues go away, that might be proof enough that the OS has a big influence on USB errors. I keep regular OS drive backups, so I can easily go back to Win 11 in 10 minutes. If I do that, I'll update this post with results.

[JohnAb]

I have an update. fresh install of Win 11 Pro. Same problems, so I purchased another NVME enclosure and tried that (Sabrent this time). It was better but not perfect. Windows wanted to repair the drive, so did that. Same problems with mouse and keyboard freezing now and then, usually when I plugged it in.

Then I noticed that the drive was incorrectly reporting the amount of space occupied by files. It was wrong by about 100GB or 10% of the total size. Next I reformatted the drive and copied all of the files back over to it. Since then, it seems to be perfect. Connects instantly and no more mouse/keyboard freezes.

So I really can't be sure if the original enclosure led to the problems or whether the NVME drive just got corrupted by itself somehow. It's a Samsung 1TB 970 Evo Plus about 5 years old and so might be suffering with old age. Anyway, if this happens to you, have a good look at the reported space used on the drive and check that against individual folder sizes. It wasn't obvious and Windows didn't see an issue, even when I "Scanned the drive for errors", but somebody might find this useful if you get similar issues. I really didn't think that a corrupt (but mostly working) drive could cause USB issues on other devices, but that seems to be my experience.

[xeromist]

JohnAb wrote:
I have an update. fresh install of Win 11 Pro. Same problems, so I purchased another NVME enclosure and tried that (Sabrent this time). It was better but not perfect. Windows wanted to repair the drive, so did that. Same problems with mouse and keyboard freezing now and then, usually when I plugged it in.

Then I noticed that the drive was incorrectly reporting the amount of space occupied by files. It was wrong by about 100GB or 10% of the total size. Next I reformatted the drive and copied all of the files back over to it. Since then, it seems to be perfect. Connects instantly and no more mouse/keyboard freezes.

So I really can't be sure if the original enclosure led to the problems or whether the NVME drive just got corrupted by itself somehow. It's a Samsung 1TB 970 Evo Plus about 5 years old and so might be suffering with old age. Anyway, if this happens to you, have a good look at the reported space used on the drive and check that against individual folder sizes. It wasn't obvious and Windows didn't see an issue, even when I "Scanned the drive for errors", but somebody might find this useful if you get similar issues. I really didn't think that a corrupt (but mostly working) drive could cause USB issues on other devices, but that seems to be my experience.

Interesting, thanks for sharing!