Windows 7 Acer 5560 USB 2.0 ports intermittently changes to 1.0

rbuskus

New Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2016
My Acer 5560 laptop has developed a USB speed problem. When I boot up, my external USB 3.0 HD is connected to a standard enhanced host controller (usb 2.0 driver) and initially works fine. Then for some strange reason the port changes to a standard OpenHCD controller (usb 1.0 driver) and I get the message "this device can perform faster....". The problem just isn't slower speeds. I can't complete a backup. I get a file error when the change happens. This "downshift" in usb speeds happens at random times, anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours.

Things I've tried over the last 2 weeks:

Moved HD to all 3 ports.
Checked usb devices via DM, No warnings and all ports are working fine.
Used USB Device Tree Viewer to verify that the external HD is changing from 2.0 to 1.0 controller.
Deleted all usb drivers and let windows 7 reinstall them.
Checked phoenix bios. No options for usb devices.
Acer website has no new usb drivers and their bios update is older than mine (1.09 vs 1.17)
Used a y-cable to give the 3.0 HD 2 ports and thus more power.
Disabled all 1.0 controllers, hubs and ports to prevent the downshift. Drive light goes out.
Changed power options to prevent sleep/hibernation modes.

PLEASE HELP! I'm going blind.

THANKS IN ADVANCE.
 
If I understand you well: connected to an usb 2.0 port of your Acer is an external HDD usb 3.0 HDD. It also gets its power from this port. Right?

- It may be a power problem: go to 'Device Manager' select 'Universal Serial Bus controllers'; there you find 'USB root hub' right click it to access the properties; go to tab 'Power Management' and remove the mark from 'Allow the computer to turn off this device...'

- It may be some hick up in the disk performance. Are disk errors reported? Can you test the disk on another system? With SEATOOLS you can test the drive and reading the error counters and or smart information. Will it also happen when you use a freshly formatted disk?

- And to make it worse, I have seen external drives of certain brands that worked not reliable on certain computers but completely reliable on others..

Hope we find something
 
If I understand you well: connected to an usb 2.0 port of your Acer is an external HDD usb 3.0 HDD. It also gets its power from this port. Right?

- It may be a power problem: go to 'Device Manager' select 'Universal Serial Bus controllers'; there you find 'USB root hub' right click it to access the properties; go to tab 'Power Management' and remove the mark from 'Allow the computer to turn off this device...'

- It may be some hick up in the disk performance. Are disk errors reported? Can you test the disk on another system? With SEATOOLS you can test the drive and reading the error counters and or smart information. Will it also happen when you use a freshly formatted disk?

- And to make it worse, I have seen external drives of certain brands that worked not reliable on certain computers but completely reliable on others..

Hope we find something
Thanks for your response Bochane. I found an old 2.0 disk drive, plugged it in and it does the same thing: "downshifts" to a 1.0 driver after a random time. Ran the seatiols utility anyway as you recommended but no help. I've resigned myself to do a windows backup at 1.0 speed but the estimated time is 78 hours!!! That's 3.5 days. Ridiculous. Will never buy an Acer laptop again.
 
So that power option thing has been checked, drivers are updated, disk has been checked and USB cable has been checked.
And 3.5 days backup is useless, you are right.

As I remember well, not all USB ports on an Acer are the same, but you tried it on all different ports, haven't you?

It might be a hardware problem; it may be something with Windows.
Can you go back to a previous restore point from before it all started?
 
So that power option thing has been checked, drivers are updated, disk has been checked and USB cable has been checked.
And 3.5 days backup is useless, you are right.

As I remember well, not all USB ports on an Acer are the same, but you tried it on all different ports, haven't you?

It might be a hardware problem; it may be something with Windows.
Can you go back to a previous restore point from before it all started?
 
So that power option thing has been checked, drivers are updated, disk has been checked and USB cable has been checked.
And 3.5 days backup is useless, you are right.

As I remember well, not all USB ports on an Acer are the same, but you tried it on all different ports, haven't you?

It might be a hardware problem; it may be something with Windows.
Can you go back to a previous restore point from before it all started?

I tried the 3.0 external drive on all 3 usb ports. same problem. I bought a 3.0 usb y-cable which uses 2 usb ports on one end and a mini 3.0 connector on the drive side. the thinking is that 3.0 standard is 900 ma and 2.0 is 500 ma. the cable is supposed to supply more power since it uses 2 2.0 usb ports. same problem. the 3.0 disk checked out ok with seatools.

I like your idea of reverting to a former restore point. that seems to be the only option i have left. the problem is I dont really remember when the problem started. I went on vacation for 2 weeks and did a massive windows update when I got back. So things have changed on my laptop. as a network engineer, I know that 80% of all problems are due to change management (excluding hardware failures). So I need to investigate what has changed and when. it could still be a hardware failure but i need to rule that out.

Thanks for your feedback.
 
Back
Top Bottom