# USB 3 Instability on Asus Motherboard



## Flash619 (Sep 8, 2016)

Hello,

Lately I've been trying to install FreeBSD onto a USB 3 drive. So far I've had three different results from three different drives, and I will list them bellow, as well as the motherboard model and versions of FreeBSD.


SanDisk 32GB - Died within a week of use. Not really much else to say. FreeBSD 10.1
Lexar 16GB - Installation went fine with FreeBSD 11 RC2 but the server would randomly reboot, dmesg showed that it was detecting the drive as 'disconnected' which caused a paging buffer error, kernel panic and thus a reboot.
PNY 16GB - During installation, as well as regular operation after installation, will randomly throw the following error:


```
WRITE(10), CDB: 2a 00 00 00 04 a2 00 00 08 00
CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
Retrying Command
```

The PNY drive was also tested on Arch Linux with Badblocks and returned 0 errors after a write/read test on all sectors. 

Whenever I use a USB 2.0 drive, everything works smoothly and I never encounter any issues aside from slow file transfers.

Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Pro
RAM: 8GB Mushkin (Non ECC) (4x2)
CPU: Intel i7 Xeon 3.2ghz

Does anyone agree that this seems specifically like a USB 3.0 issue? Is there anything else I could try and check? I've looked around quite a bit and have googled these individual errors but have yet to find a specific solution.


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## Snurg (Sep 8, 2016)

If it is not a hardware issue (long/bad cables/connectors, inferior/cheapo/counterfeit electronics etc), you may need to apply some quirk(s) to make specific sticks with nonstandard behaviors work fine.
See explanations in usbconfig(8) and usb_quirks(4).
Aside of that, I doubt you will have lasting fun with any USB stick as system HDD replacement. No wear leveling=quick demise.


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## User23 (Sep 8, 2016)

Is the BIOS up to "date"? Latest Version P8P67 PRO BIOS 3602 2012/11/28


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## Flash619 (Sep 8, 2016)

Snurg said:


> If it is not a hardware issue (long/bad cables/connectors, inferior/cheapo/counterfeit electronics etc), you may need to apply some quirk(s) to make specific sticks with nonstandard behaviors work fine.
> See explanations in usbconfig(8) and usb_quirks(4).
> Aside of that, I doubt you will have lasting fun with any USB stick as system HDD replacement. No wear leveling=quick demise.



Well the USB stick will have minimal writes as the jails, nfs shares, etc... are all on a ZFS pool. All the USB really does is boot and mount. I would prefer a hard drive though to end this instability. However, due to said ZFS pool, my motherboard is full as six hard drives make up the pool. So I have no spare sata connection for the OS.

Could you perhaps recommend a SATA card that works well with FreeBSD? That way I would have an extra port and could toss in a 32GB SSD. Would something like this work?



User23 said:


> Is the BIOS up to "date"? Latest Version P8P67 PRO BIOS 3602 2012/11/28



Yes.


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## Flash619 (Sep 11, 2016)

Well I never found a solution to this problem. USB seemed a bit flakey for running an OS, so I put in a new hard drive which has been working perfectly!


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