Question When I use an external M2 SSD, all my USB ports go crazy, was working on June 17

Aug 24, 2022
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Back on June 17 I got an external PC SSD enclosure for an M2 SSD. At that time it worked perfectly. Moving up to today, August 24. (haven't used the drive since) I plug it in and now whenever I try to copy data to it or run a benchmark, my whole system goes crazy. USB devices disconnect and reconnect, the drive disconnects, all my bluetooth connections drop. I've never seen anything like it. Can't run disk check or even format it.

A standard SSD in an external enclosure works fine, my INTERNAL M2 SSD also works fine. I haven't done any software updates since June except for the ones automatically pushed by microsoft.

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this or what it could be?

The system is an Alienware R11 with windows 10 version 20h2 19042.1826 which was auto installed just a few days ago.

I've tried the drive in two different M2 SSD enclosures and on different USB ports with the same results. However the drive/enclosure seems to be working fine when I test it with my Macbook. I need to find a different windows computer with USB 3.1 to see if the problem is common with other machines.
 
usb power has limit, i have no clue how much power your mainboard can provide to all of your USBs, but this power is not per port, its shared with all USB ports, if you overload it, you will see devices starting acting up (random disconnecting)
external power supply can avoid this, if you have powered USB hub or dock, use it
if your M2 is nvme, than 5V 4A power supply recommended
 
Aug 24, 2022
3
0
10
usb power has limit, i have no clue how much power your mainboard can provide to all of your USBs, but this power is not per port, its shared with all USB ports, if you overload it, you will see devices starting acting up (random disconnecting)
external power supply can avoid this, if you have powered USB hub or dock, use it
if your M2 is nvme, than 5V 4A power supply recommended
Thanks for the suggestion, I will give it a try. However this really doesn't explain why it worked back in June and doesn't now. I think I may actually have less stuff plugged into USB than I did back then.
 
Aug 24, 2022
3
0
10
Thanks for the suggestion, I will give it a try. However this really doesn't explain why it worked back in June and doesn't now. I think I may actually have less stuff plugged into USB than I did back then.
I tried using a powered USB hub. On the first attempt the benchmark froze in the middle, on the second one it finished.

I also tried disconnecting ALL USB devices from my computer and retried with one of the USB ports on the back, this still causes everything to go crazy, the disk and bluetooth disconnect...etc.

I know this was working a month ago, so I'm really confused.