USB 3 port unstable

[Fransski]

When i connect the USB device to the guest (a WD 2TB drive on USB3.0), it shows in the guest OS. But it never works very long. After a while, the transfer speed drops to a point that no data is transferred anymory.

There does not seem to be any issue with the hardware: extensive use of the same USB device directly from the host works perfect.

[Fransski]

Vbox log files

[Frank Mehnert]

What are the steps to reproduce? Do you copy a fille from the USB disk to the (virtual) hard disk or the other way around? Are you using the Windows explorer for doing that? To me it does not make much sense if the transfer slows down. It sounds rather as if the transfer aborts completely.

[Fransski]

Replying to frank:

What are the steps to reproduce? Do you copy a fille from the USB disk to the (virtual) hard disk or the other way around? Are you using the Windows explorer for doing that? To me it does not make much sense if the transfer slows down. It sounds rather as if the transfer aborts completely.

Hi Frank, I copied from the VM to USB. First, I used backup software (Paragon & Bestsync), then I tried Windows Explorer. In both cases, the system hangs.I have to reboot the VM to get a working user interface again (not possible to end the Explorer process with task manager. The quanity of data was relatively large(200 GB). I did an additional test with 40.000 files in 20 GB. this completes... but only in 1 hour.

[Fransski]

This issue still exists. I repeated the tests:

• transfers of 20 GB or less from VM to USB always work.
• larger transfers causes "everything" to hang:
  • the file transfer hangs
  • Windows Explorer hangs
  • it is not possible to terminate the WE process
  • a "shutdown" command on the VM is unsuccesful
  • a "poweroff" command for the VM on Virtualbox is never executes: at 56% "time left" only increases
  • a shutdown command on the Host does not complete either: see attached screenshot

[Yurii Kolesnykov]

Confirm this on ArchLinux & OSX 10.11 El Capitan. In my case VB just reconnects the USB 3.0 FlashDrive.

[dotpointer]

I can somewhat confirm this using Debian Jessie 8.3 64-bit as host with client being Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. VirtualBox version is 5.0.16r105871, installed from virtualbox.org as I wanted the USB 3 feature, with VirtualBox Extension Pack 5.0.16-105871 and the supplied guest additions installed.

Physical system is a Gigabyte BXBT-1900 with one single USB 3-port and to that was a WD Elements Portable USB3-disk with the supplied USB3-cable connected. The computer, the port, the cable and the disk works fine outside VirtualBox running in USB 3-mode in just Debian Jessie.

I tried running Recuva file recovery program on the disk in VirtualBox in the Windows 7 guest OS several times and it fails silently after just a few minutes and stalls on 0% done. If I check the Windows system log it says "Driver detected a controller error on device harddisk1 dr1", source is "Disk". Leaving it in this state makes the disk go to sleep - the drive light blinks slowly. Sometimes the program says something about an I/O error on the controller.

Connecting the same disk to one of the two USB 2-ports works fine, no errors and Recuva runs without problem.

Sorry for not being more precise, but I can confirm that something is buggy with USB 3 support.

[dotpointer]

"Driver detected a controller error on device ..."

[Yurii Kolesnykov]

Also Gigabyte MB here: GA-H87-D3H

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent version of VirtualBox.