caution for USB 3.0 using Renesas chipset

There's a somewhat hard lesson I learned about Renesas USB 3.0 but it's on the Windows side. I've installed two USB 3.0 PCIE cards in desktop computers, Renesas being a very inexpensive chipset brand. Performance is incredible, but there's an Achilles heel. If there's any sleep mode, the units are pulled offline and not accessible. I tried an entire day to update the firmware but that's not possible either. At revision 3 they've locked you out of going higher than v2x firmware.

I found a workaround, if you power the computer down, then turn off the power supply, and then hit the power button so it light's up a hair for 1/4 second, you know? Then it will startup and work fine. But any internal mention of a power event and it goes off line again. So if you're testing like the mini PCIE card like me and maybe bodhi bought and have bad results, this could be a reason why.

The more research I've done, the more I'm convinced Renesas is a chipset to stay away from. I hope that helps someone, and I hope I can hustle myself some better USB 3.0 cards, but might just be a lamer and wire a switch out to toggle electricity supplied to the card (when the machine is running) and use what I have.

Hope this helps someone on the Linux side or explains strange behavior.

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-= Cloud 9 =-



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2018 03:10PM by JoeyPogoPlugE02.

JoeyPogoPlugE02 Wrote:
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>
but might just..... wire a switch out to toggle electricity supplied to the card (when the machine is running) and use what I have.
>

Lamer??? - NO WAY - thats a hacker :)))))

Joey,

> I found a workaround, if you power the computer
> down, then turn off the power supply, and then hit
> the power button so it light's up a hair for 1/4
> second, you know? Then it will startup and work
> fine. But any internal mention of a power event
> and it goes off line again. So if you're testing
> like the mini PCIE card like me and maybe bodhi
> bought and have bad results, this could be a
> reason why.

Cool find :) who could have thought of that. May be it was why the Pogo Pro box behaved badly with this mPCIe card.

-bodhi
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