P5Q Deluxe USB/ESATA quirk resolved

I am using XP X64 and have two external seagate 2t green drives in
Thermatake A2395 Silver River Duo enclosures. I was having problems with
one of the drives and thought either the enclosure or the new drive was
bad. I tested the drive internally and it's fine and also tested the
enclosure with another drive and it's good. I have installed two of the (2)
port usb brackets to the blue internal headers. I was using both external
drives on the same bracket and discovered on boot screen that "01" was seen
as high speed and "02" did not display high speed. I have connected each
drive to a different bracket and at boot both show high speed.

At one point I installed the Marvel ESATA driver but later decided to use
both drives as usb so I uninstalled the driver. When I had problems with
the one drive I reinstalled the marvel driver and both drives work fine on
the ESATA port. I have come to the conclusion that whether or not you are
using the ESATA port it's not a bad idea to install the driver anyway and
just disable the boot rom. I may be wrong but ever since I reloaded the
driver both drives work flawless as USB. BTW, the bios settings are
correctly set for the ESATA to work.

Does anyone know if it's best not to have two high speed devices on the
same usb port pair? It seems like all ports should be high speed and that
you should be able to connect whatever device to any port. Or does the
marvel driver have a positive effect on the usb ports?

BTW, thanks again to Paul and Rob for helping me a few months back with
ESATA issues I had.

I decided to post my findings in hopes of helping others that are having
weird quirks with ESATA or USB.

 

From my experiences with capturing video using hi-res USB2 webcams,
I would say that you want only one high-throughput device on each
controller. When I had 2 cameras on the same port pair, I was
getting dropped frames when capturing from both simultaneously.
This was solved when I moved one camera to a port on a different
enhanced controller.
Because of the above, I believe the bandwidth of each USB controller
is shared between the two ports it controls, but I can't find a definitive
source to quote at the moment.
You could test things by copying large (GB sized) files/folders between
the 2 drives and timing how long it takes (or configure Performance in
Administrative Tools to show read and write bytes per second for both
drives), both when the drives are connected to the same port-pair and
when connected to separate ones.

HTH & Regards,

 

Thank you for the reply Rob.
I had tried putting the two externals G: & H: on different controllers and
still got had problems with H:. For a while I thought it was heat related
because it seemed to crap out after 30 min or so. All cables are new, tried
swapping cables between the two drives and swapped the controllers they
were on and still had the same result. It sure seems that as soon as I
decided to play with the ESATA again and loaded the Marvel driver the
problem was gone. I have run chkdsk /r which took a long time for the 2T
drive and the drive was perfect. I have copied huge files and had no
problems. I can turn the drives on before or after boot and everything is
still fine. Does it make any sense to you that loading the Marvel cured the
problem? BTW, both drives G & H are new and both enclosures are too. I
replaced the H drive enclosure once and still had the problem. I also
hooked H up to an internal sata port and it ran fine. Sometimes you just
can't figure Windows quirks out and this is one of those cases.