So I’ve been fighting with this stupid thing ever since I got it. During setup, the USB4 ports did not work with my drives or dock. After installing the drivers and firmware and windows 11, they started working sporadically. I can somewhat reliably get one USB4 device to work in one of the USB4 ports, but if I try to use two USB4 devices, one in each port, after a short time one of the ports fails and refuses to provide power to the device. If I try to move the devices around, both ports fail. Reboots do not reliably resolve this issue. Even keeping the computer unplugged for 30 minutes does not reliably resolve this issue. It seems like they have a fundamental flaw in their USB4 controller firmware, but support is making me jump through hoops like taking my entire computer apart and taking pictures of the motherboard for some reason to troubleshoot a firmware issue. They’re being completely obstinate despite the overwhelming abundance of evidence that I’ve sent them showing that drives work in the USB 3 ports but not the USB 4 ports. They also gave me incorrect instructions on how to see connected devices in the UEFI, which is a feature that doesn’t seem to be available on the desktop, at least according to the instructions they gave me. Between the uselessness of support and the uselessness of this machine I don’t really see any redeeming qualities for keeping it. Has anybody else run into issues with the USB4 ports? They’re effectively useless on my machine.
I did not manage to get the USB4 drives to work on Windows 10 either, … with a ASRock Industrial 7640U mini-PC. With Linux it worked out of the box. Maybe I just had bad luck but I have the impression that Windows just isn’t very good in its universal support of USB4 drives.
Would be interesting to see if Linux has issues with the USB4 drive or not. Now that you are mentioning it, I am curious and will try out one of my USB4 external SSDs.
If you think the machine is useless, I wonder why you got one to begin with. In my view the published information on Strix Halo, previous to being charged for delivery of the FD, turned out fairly accurate.
I tested my two USB4 external SSDs on the Framework Desktop, running openSUSE Tumbleweed. The drives did not show up when booting up with them but when I unplugged and plugged them in again, while the OS was running, they immediately showed up as USB drives and I could mount them in KDE’s dolphin with a single click and entering my password. As plug and play as it gets. They are operating as Raid1, so I only get one drive in file system but fdisk showed me that indeed both drivers were recognised and available.
Granted I did not do any in depth testing but looked fine on a quick look.
So maybe you want to give it a try on your system. It should be enough to create a Linux Live USB and boot up with that and then test the USB4 drives with that system.
Thank you for the suggestions, I’ll give it a spin on Linux but don’t have high hopes since the drives fail to initialize even when in UEFI. They power on for a moment when first plugged in but then immediately power down. My USB-C power meter indicates that all power from the mobo is cut, rather than the device going into standby. And please excuse my frustration. I’ve been trying to deal with Framework Support for a week and they consistently run me around in circles despite me providing conclusive evidence of an issue. Somehow they think a photo of the mobo will tell them what’s happening; I’m dubious but plan to get the photos for them anyway when I have time to tear this thing apart (assuming I don’t rage quit before then). I use two external NVME/USB4 SSDs in my daily workflow and not being able to use them, yes, makes this effectively useless for me. I had high hopes from the specs but the machine just isn’t living up to the promise. The real frustrating bit is that my USB4 drives work perfectly with my Framework 16 laptop so I can’t think of an excusable reason they don’t work on the desktop. USB4 on the 16 was rock solid, this simply is not.
Well, I get your frustration, I am not from Framework. I just wanted to see if this is a general issue or one more sporadic, appears to be rather the latter. No harm in trying if Linux is effected as well, unless of course you have absolutely no use for a Linux system, then it might be only for getting some information out of it.
My impression is that external USB4 SSD drives tend to be often quite flaky. Much more so than simple USB 3.1 sticks. It might be really down to the very external USB4 drive controller to PC/Laptop USB4 controller combination if things work and if they work reliably.
In case find out more it would be certainly interesting to hear about it here, but I totally get if you are trying to return it if you can’t get it working reliably.
How long have you had the pc?
You have 30 days to return it, no questions asked, as far as I know.
Have you seen this:
It is a recent BIOS for the FW Desktop.
It mentions in the release notes:
6) Enabled 3A PD profiles on the back ports.
That might solve your USB4 enclosure problems.
Edit: FW removed the “enabled 3A PD” from the release notes, so it probably does not help now.
That being said, the FW13 and FW16, although they have 2 USB4 ports, they cannot actually provide much power to the ports. 15W to only one port at a time.
So, that might be why one USB4 device works and the second does not. Maybe not enough power is available for two at the same time.
The FW Desktop documentation does not say what power it can supply to its USB4 ports, so I don’t know for sure either way.
But, BIOS 3.03 might help you.
I had not seen this, I am going to give it a shot right away thank you!
Unfortunately bios 3.03 did not resolve my issue. Additionally, the devices continue to fail under Linux (Arch Linux portable drive). They simply don’t show up as hardware devices with lspci or lsblk, and no new device is show up under /dev when I plug them in. Furthermore there are two lights on the main board that are lit up after booting to desktop. One appears to be labeled LED 3 and is positioned just to the left of the primary SSD m.2 socket, the second one is labeled LED 2 and right near the bottom right heatsink screw. I have absolutely no idea what these LEDs could mean.
Hi. The 3.03 firmware was worth a try.
It is a shame the usb4 ports don’t work for you.
Given that I have had similar problems with usb4 on my FW16 7840HS, and FW have not fixed it for 18 months now, I would recommend returning the desktop to FW as you are already thinking of doing. Try to do that within the 30days limit.
It appears that FW have removed this line from the BIOS 3.03 release notes.
6) Enabled3APDprofilesonthebackports.
So, the fix might come in the next release instead.
I expect so, since the GitHub issue is marked as “In Progress” - I hope the beta isn’t too far out because this machine is perfect otherwise and at this point I REALLY wanna keep it.
Have you tried a powered usb hub in between your drive and the framework? I ask because I have to do that with my one USB4 drive on my husbands framework 16. I just was not providing enough power, and when I went with powered hub the connection issues disappeared.