My Mouse Lags and Freezes when I plug in a USB Hard Drive

[knifeknerd]

My System is a built Intel 12th gen rig. Gaming PC, all Asus ROG Hardware with DDR5 on a Z690 Strix Motherboard. The problem I have is I cannot run a USB Hard Drive because when I plug it in the mouse begins lagging and freezing real bad and PC is basically unusable. Initially I thought maybe it was a faulty USB driver but Updating, uninstalling and reinstalling the USB Drivers did not help. Then I thought maybe it was the HDD itself but the problem persists with a different USB hard drive. Google searches turned up suggestions like disabling power saving feature for USB nothing has worked thus far.
Now I have a sneaking suspicion and I am just looking for confirmation.

So I think maybe the issue is I just have too many internal hdd's installed in the machine and there is no bandwidth left to operate USB devices. I have 3 internal mechanical drives, an M.2 running the OS and another 2.5" SSD used as a scratch disc for video editing and stuff. Did I max out what my motherboard can handle storage wise and have to unplug a hdd to be able to use an External hdd? Or is this some other bug perhaps with windows 11?

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Internal drive are using either SATA or PCIe and are not related to USB at all. USB devices are handled by the USB Controller chip on the board.
If you are experiencing issues like this, try moving the two devices farther away from each other in regards to USB ports as you may be running into USB bandwidth issues.

If you are plugging them both into a USB hub/extension thing don't.
Anything that takes one USB and splits it out to multiple is a nono for high bandwidth, at the very least remove the HDD from that chain and plug it directly into the motherboard.

 

[knifeknerd]

Internal drive are using either SATA or PCIe and are not related to USB at all. USB devices are handled by the USB Controller chip on the board.
If you are experiencing issues like this, try moving the two devices farther away from each other in regards to USB ports as you may be running into USB bandwidth issues.

If you are plugging them both into a USB hub/extension thing don't.
Anything that takes one USB and splits it out to multiple is a nono for high bandwidth, at the very least remove the HDD from that chain and plug it directly into the motherboard.

Well thanks for the opinion but I don't think that's it... I have 3 total usb devices plugged into the motherboard on a pretty expensive Asus motherboard. A mouse, a Keyboard and the external hard drive I am attempting to use. Moving the mouse and keyboard all the way to the other side of the case to the front ports had no effect on the problem. The motherboard has 10 usb ports on it counting the 2 usb c ports... Other usb devices such as printers or game controllers do not effect the operation of my mouse and keyboard when they are plugged in, only external hard drives...So I'm not buying that having usb ports next to eachother is causing interference. There has to be something else going on. I also forgot to mention the mouse has a wireless option and if unplugged completely from usb and running purely on bluetooth is still effected by the hard drive being plugged in.... So this begins to point more and more to it being a Windows 11 issue perhaps? I had no issues running this hard drive back when I had windows 10 on the same motherboard.

 

[knifeknerd]

So what I did was switched my USB cable on the mouse to Type C on both ends and ran it to the Type C port on the motherboard, no mouse lag when the hard drive is plugged in was the result but there is another problem with the hard drive... So copying files to the hard drive starts out strong, over 100 mbps then transfer rate suddenly drops to 0 and will not proceed... Maybe the drive is bad I don't know... It's barely been used WD My Book 8TB... If I plug in my other hard drive, files transfer normally but it is a much slower usb powered drive...

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

if you have issues with your USB HDD itself, you may need to create another thread post specifically for that, assuming that you don't have access to any sort of warranty/customer support from Western Digital.