I have an Asus Z87-Plus motherboard. This motherboard has 6 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel. 2 of them are the Intel Z87 USB 3 ports and 4 are ASMedia USB 3.0 ports. Also I have 2 USB 3.0 ports and 2 USB 2.0 ports on the front panel. Those are controlled by the Intel Z87 chipset as well.
This is a new pc and the problem I am having is that if I plug any USB 3.0 device into any of the Intel USB 3.0 ports I get serious system instability. I have a Western Digital Elements USB 3.0 hard drive. Sometimes the computer locks up and requires a hard restart, most of the time the device keeps appearing/disappearing from Windows Explorer and Windows claims that it is not formatted. Other times the device is detected long enough where I can start browsing the files and copy files. In that case, I get many disk I/O errors in the windows Event Viewer and then the disk will eventually be undetected. This only happens when it is plugged into one of the Intel USB 3.0 ports. If I plug a USB 3.0 device into the ASMedia USB 3.0 ports, then it works as expected. If I plug it into a USB 2.0 port (which is maintained by the Intel Z87 chipset) it also works as expected. I can plug USB 2.0 devices into the Intel Z87 USB 3.0 ports and they will work as expected.The problem only crops up if a USB 3.0 device is plugged into one the Intel USB 3.0 ports.
I am using Windows 7 64-bit with all the latest Windows Updates and the latest BIOS from ASUS.
This is the driver I am using: USB 3.0 Driver: Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Intel® 8 Series/C220 Chipset Family version 2.5.1.28 which I just downloaded today. I originally was using version 2.5.0.19 of that same driver provided by Asus. Both versions gave me the same problem.
If I uninstall the drivers completely, all the usb ports work as expected and there is no instability - however, I think without the drivers I am operating only at USB 2 speeds even on the USB 3 ports. Also if I change "Intel xHCI Mode" from the USB Configuration setting in my bios to "Disabled", the usb ports work as well but again only at USB 2 speeds. I looking for some advice or help in figuring out if this is a hardware problem with the motherboard or a driver problem with the Intel drivers or some bios setting. Does anyone have any ideas how I can debug this further or maybe know about a similar problem?