Why is Windows so stupid with USB3?

storageman said:

@Gurn Blanston, Do you know the manufacture of your external enclosure ? The reason I ask, the problem your having is probably due to the chipset manufacture of the controller used inside of your external enclosure. I had a similar problem a few years back as your having, large file transfers to the device would fail and the drive would be AOL. After much testing I found the enclosure would work flawlessly when connected to a 2.2ghz cpu, but would consistently fail when used with my new I7 4.0ghz system. It ended up being that the chipset that was being used in the enclosure couldn't keep up with the faster systems. I believe its a combination of your FAST CPU & a slow USB 3.0 chipset inside your external enclosure. PS mine, like yours would work on the fast system but using only USB 2.0. It was painfully slow.

That certainly is something to consider. I think I have ruled out pretty much everything else.

It's an Insignia enclosure, sold by Staples in Canada. I have no idea what the model number is, though. It wasn't really expensive so I'm not out much. I'm thinking at this point that a hot swap bay might be a better idea anyway for backup drives. SATA speed and none of this USB nonsense.

I'm going to mark this thread solved, since I believe that the USB3 ports on my machine are borked and so is the enclosure. I will just use USB2 until I get a hot swap bay.

Thanks to all who helped. :)

^ This is what I was about to ask. I have had enclosures in the past that do their own "power management", which was not good (was a Seagate I think). Look to see if there is software that comes with the enclosure that lets you disable this feature.

I have had excellent results with Vantec NexStar USB 3.0 enclosures, which support UASP for really good performance. They are not very expensive either.