Windows – Complete USB 3.0 potential not being realized

driversexternal hard driveusbusb-3windows 8

I have a ASUS K55VM laptop which has 2 USB 3.0 ports. I'm running on Windows 8 x64. When I use plug in a USB 3.0 external hard drive from any 1 of the USB ports I get write/read speeds of only ~25MBps. This opposed to my other laptop (Dell XPS with USB 3.0 ports also running on Windows 8 x64) gets ~100MBps.

I have also searched for installed the relevant drivers for my ASUS laptop.

Intel points out the following:
USB 3.0 Support

Here's the link to the FAQ Intel article: USB 3.0 devices are not working at USB 3.0 speed in Windows 8*

In the second link, I do not understand the cause. I have included a picture of the device manager for reference.

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Here's a picture of the external hard drives in question. It's a Toshiba Canvio 1TB.

When I plug it onto the ASUS one, notice that the light glows WHITE.

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When I plug it into the DELL one, notice that the light glows BLUE indicating that it is functioning in true USB 3.0 mode.

enter image description here

Best Answer

Ensure first that you have installed the latest BIOS, then read further if the problem still exists. Check carefully that the linked version is later than the one you have.

From Windows 8 and Intel USB 3.0 Host Controllers :

One of the new features of Windows 8 is the built in XHCI host controller software and USB stack. While this brings some benefits like UASP support, there are some devices that currently don’t work with the Microsoft stack on the Intel USB 3.0 host controller. This can be fixed by forcing Windows to use the Intel USB 3.0 host controller drivers instead of the built in stack.

The article then describes in great detail how to force the installation of the Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver. The download link it gives to the Intel site will contain the latest version, rather than the one mentioned in the article.

However, before executing this, I suggest to ensure that you have backups, at least creating a system restore point (but even better is taking an image of the system disk).

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