Why isn't my new USB 3.0 card / USB 3.0 hard drives working under FreeNAS?

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron Desktop 580 into which I have installed a RocketU 1144A USB 3.0 card. The system is running FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA4, which is based on FreeBSD 8 and supposedly has USB 3.0 support...

I have four Western Digital MyBook Essential 2TB USB 3.0 drives. One of them was previously working with this system on a built-in USB 2.0 port before the new USB 3.0 card was installed. Now that the new USB 3.0 card is installed, the system doesn't see any of the drives regardless of whether they are plugged into the new USB 3.0 card or the built-in USB 2.0 ports!

It's very odd and doesn't make sense. I know that BSD recognizes the High Point USB card:

[root@chef /mnt/Chef/home/jnet]# usbconfig 
ugen0.1: <XHCI root HUB 0x1b21> at usbus0, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=SUPER (4.8Gbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen1.1: <XHCI root HUB 0x1b21> at usbus1, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=SUPER (4.8Gbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen2.1: <XHCI root HUB 0x1b21> at usbus2, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=SUPER (4.8Gbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen3.1: <XHCI root HUB 0x1b21> at usbus3, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=SUPER (4.8Gbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen4.1: <EHCI root HUB Intel> at usbus4, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH (480Mbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen5.1: <EHCI root HUB Intel> at usbus5, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH (480Mbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen4.2: <product 0x0020 vendor 0x8087> at usbus4, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH (480Mbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen5.2: <product 0x0020 vendor 0x8087> at usbus5, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH (480Mbps) pwr=SAVE
ugen4.3: <DT 101 G2 Kingston> at usbus4, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH (480Mbps) pwr=ON
ugen5.3: <Dell USB Entry Keyboard Dell> at usbus5, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=LOW (1.5Mbps) pwr=ON

Those first four XHCI root HUBs must be the 4 channels on the card... But when I plug one of the USB hard drives in, I don't get an entry under /dev and the only message which shows up in dmesg or syslog is:

ugen0.2: <Unknown> at usbus0 (disconnected)

Where ugen0.2 may be ugen0.2 - ugen3.2.

I am not using any USB hubs. The system is booted off a USB thumb drive, but apart from that, has no other USB devices connected.

I wonder if part of the problem could be that I installed the USB 3.0 card, a 4x PCIe 2.0 card, in the 16x PCIe slot on the motherboard? Yet, the card is recognized by the OS...

---

UPDATE: Could this new USB card have somehow fried my new drives??? I suddenly can't get them to mount on any machine. But like I said, I know one of them was working -- I loaded 1.6 TB of data onto it!

I just plugged a USB 2 drive into the new USB 3 card, and that mounted successfully...

Answer 1

Enough time has passed that I suspect you've already got a solution to this; if so, could you post it?

Otherwise, some starting points:

• You might try using one of usbconfig's options (like dump_device_desc or dump_config while a drive is connected to see if you can see anything:

  usbconfig -u 0 -a 2 dump_info

• If the product and vendor combo isn't currently recognized by FreeBSD, it can't tell which drive to attach to the device. I don't know if different devices are presented to the OS for USB2 vs USB3, but it's a possibility. You might check /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/usbdevs for FreeBSD 8 and/or FreeNAS 8.0.1 to see if the devices vendor/product combo is listed (if you can determine them with usbconfig, or maybe from /var/run/dmesg.boot when the machine is booted with the drives attached.)

• Most USB3 devices are downward-compatible; does the system recognize the drives when you plug them into a USB2 port?