For whatever reason, I’ve always found that trying to use USB storage for just about anything just plain sucks. This especially true if you try to hang a USB drive off of a hub. I’m always plagued with disconnects and mysterious lockups when I try that.
Directly attaching the drive to your PC or device generally works better, but is far from foolproof. But if your device only has one available port, you may not have many options.
The best solution I’ve found so far (and again, it’s not foolproof) is to use a Thunderbolt hub. For whatever reason, I have relatively few problems with the mysterious disconnects and process hangs that I see with USB hubs.
Anyone know why USB storage is so unreliable, and why connecting such devices to a Thunderbolt dock seems to work so much better?
Type-C USB at least, is a very flaky connection spec. I’ve had no end of trouble with it disconnecting or having connection problems in general. It’s a pretty terrible physical connector.
For Type A, I’ve not personally experienced these problems with USB much at all, but I know that USB thumb drives use very very weak processing and low quality nand flash, to keep costs down, and because there isn’t much room for cooling in that tiny plastic case. The smaller the thumbdrive, the worse it likely is.
For external SATA, similar problems apply, but the fault lies with a loosely compliant SATA controller often intended for use with only a particular type of drive. Things like TRIM support may not exist, certain commands may just lock up the controller and force it to reset or some such, drawing much power for the drive may overwhelm the lacking power supply/circuit…
I think the issues you’re having are mostly related to the storage controller you’re using. I’ll give you a quick example: I have a number of USB thumb drives. One of them is a Lexar 128GB and that particular one, for some reason, tends to hang up while transfering files, it’s slow to umount after a file transfer (I disabled caching so it’s writing directly to the drive). While a 128GB Samsung thumb drive is really fast and snappy, never hangs, unmounts without any issues. Another issue I had with storage to USB controller was when I bought a cheap SATA enclosure by Aukey. On my Ryzen system it would disconnect frequently and do all sorts of dumb stuff. Once I replaced it with a know reliable adapter I had already tested before all the issues went away and copied 100s of GBs to an from that drive without issues.
All this wall of text to say that all the issues are mostly on the storage to USB controllers and sometimes up to the platform manufacturer that’s powering your device. It’s really hard to find a decent combo that works reliably.
Do you have a rule of thumb (pun intended) for chosing USB thumb drives that will work reliably?
Yes, small drives tend to overheat more, but I’ve run FreeNAS off a tiny drive that barely protruded and on it worked fine. It now continues to run fine as overlayfs for my OpenWRT router. On the other hand, I have 3 large Kingston DataTraveler drives that overheat while being idle.
Sometimes reliability has also to do what internal hubs on your PC the traffic has to go through. Adding another one might be the breaking point.
With USB Hubs, I generally had good experience over 20 years. I usually buy branded ones - but quality can still vary - I have a second USB-SATA bridge from DIGITUS which can’t hold a steady connection with any device while the first one is rock solid, most likely because it’s based on another chipset.
Most dekstop motherboards already use hubs for their rear USB, so hanging a hub from there would be like daisy-chaining two hubs. You are better off just getting an extension cable, unless the device you are attaching needs extra power to properly run. Hubs are convenient, but they are for laptops or devices with actual limited USB ports. I do use a powered hub for my desktops, but I have to be careful what and how many devices are connected otherwise connection quality/reliability becomes an issue.
Now for the USB drive itself, sometimes it’s hit and miss. I have had good luck with ADATA and WD drives. Seagate not so much. Something is really wrong with the USB controllers Seagate use for their external drives, because it’s both slower and less reliable than competing brands (in my experience at least)
The best USB drive I ever bought was a Samsung 128GB drive with a metal casing. The metal helped with thermal management and the flash was pretty damn speedy.
I actually have pretty good experiences with a Orico RTL9120 based USB to NVMe adapter that’s connected to the rear panel USB 10Gbps ports with quality USB cables.
The problems come when I connect the drive to the front panel USB ports or when dodgy USB cables were used. 10Gbps USB doesn’t really work reliably if the signal isn’t stable enough.
It’s not that bad but your average cheap as chips USB hub/controller might not be the best…
In my experience recent USB hub controllers from VIA and ASMedia work reliably, when it comes to storage it’s kinda a mixed bag. Some variants of ASMedia controllers seem to work better than others. I’d be very interested in trying VIA’s offers but they seem to be hard to find.
There’s a lot of old and craptastic storage controllers out there so it’s a bit of a pain unless you do your research.
I’ve seen these kinds of problems across all kinds of ‘host’ devices; Intel, AMD, Apple, you name it. (Though it does seem to be more prevalent on the older AMD desktops I’ve used.)
My use cases seem to be more varied than what most here are using USB storage for. For example, on laptops with no replaceable storage I’ll use them for dual booting from an external drive. And even if it is an edge case, USB sucks hard for running a full operating system. Unfortunately, for some devices there’s no alternative to USB.