I use a lot of external storage and it has been hard to find a USB hub that is fast, connects all my devices at once, and when using a device doesn’t drop other devices connected to it.
I finally found one that’s rock solid; it’s the Anker 13-Port USB 3.0 and it does everything I ever wanted.
Things were good until mid-January 2016 when the device started malfunctioning in strange ways. The first three ports did not recognize any device I put on it. The other ports sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Reliability went out the window and I was forced to stop using it. My guess was that something burned out. I went so far as to buy another smaller USB 3.0 hub, and well, it didn’t work either — so much so I ended up returning it. I really wanted this hub working.
Curious, I handed the broken device to an electrical engineer and asked him if he could ascertain what was wrong with it. He took it apart, did diagnostic tests, saw nothing wrong, tried it on his computer, it worked fine, and handed it back to me fixed as just a mystery. However the story doesn’t stop there.
The Impossible Behavior
When I connected the device back up to my Mac, it behaved exactly the same way as it did before. I, of course, tried all my Mac’s USB ports. I even tried a completely different Mac. Identical failures.
So sure the device was working, my electrical engineer friend pulled out his Microsoft Surface Tablet, connected the hub, and instantly it worked.
We put it back on my Macs, with the same devices that just worked, it failed. Back to the Surface, it worked. Back to the Mac, it failed. In short, it was an electrical engineer’s WTF-nightmare.
The Common Denominator and Other Clues
At this point the problem was clearly related to the Mac. More over, it used to work just fine, at least until mid-January. What happened in mid-January? El Capitan 10.11.3.
Both Macs were running El Capitan 10.11.3.
As a general rule, with Apple, the first generation hardware products have flaws, and the operating systems versions don’t usually get all the kinks out until version x.x.4 is released. This threw immediate suspicion on the operating system, which meant it was time to check if other folks were having similar issues.
Yes they were. (See this discussion.)
The Fix
While you’d think that one would need to go to Anker’s Driver Download page, that’s not the case. You need to do two things:
- Reset the NVRAM / PRAM. (For a MacBook Pro it’s the Command-Option-P-R chord on boot.)
- Reset the SMC. (For a MacBook Pro it’s the Shift-Option-Command-PowerOnButton.)
When the machine rebooted the USB hub behaved just like it used to. Problem solved.
UPDATE (21-Mar-2016): With the introduction of El Capitan 10.11.4, it rebroke the USB 3.0 capabilities again. The Console reports:
3/23/16 4:32:20.000 PM kernel[0]: 000227.351907 AppleUSB30Hub@14400000: AppleUSBHub::start: failed to set configuration with 0xe00002eb
3/23/16 4:32:21.000 PM kernel[0]: 000228.290970 AppleUSB30Hub@14400000: AppleUSB30Hub::start: failed to set hub depth 0 (0xe0005000)
So far, performing the above steps are not working.
OTHERS ARE HAVING IT TOO: Often the problem manifests as if the USB device, or something connected to it, is no longer working or has inadequate power, or is no longer detected by the host system.
- Mar 9, 2016 – item.224748 – John Bryan
- StaigerTiger on /r/applehelp Reddit
- Kordax in Apple Support Communities
- Ataru-69 in Apple Support Communities
- The Hackintosh Community that’s even got an explanation and workaround. (A well deserved shout-out to TORLEY in the comments below for this one.)
Try your device on an older operating system (ideally the same hardware if you can), a Windows box, a Linux box, or even a Raspberry Pi — you’ll see the USB device works properly there.
YOU CAN HELP: It appears Apple may not know about the problem.
- Report it as a bug in OS X via the Apple Bug Reporter.
- Provide feedback via http://www.apple.com/feedback/
Please be kind when reporting issue, as these are the people who can help you. Give them technical details and model information to help them track it down.
UPDATE (06-May-2016): Apple has acknowledged issue 26102223 in their system and have asked for more information; I’m forwarding it to them.
UPDATE (09-Oct-2016): SOLUTION — It’s LeapMotion’s Fault!!
It seems that the Leap Motion driver may be the culprit here! Uninstalling the driver (according to their instructions at https://support.leapmotion.com/entries/39493988-Uninstalling-the-Leap-Motion-software-on-Mac-OSX) caused the device to spring back to life without even a reboot required. Credit and thanks to David Ryskalczyk for hunting this down.
*** Between MAY and OCT, this blog suffered a large data-loss pertaining to the comments left by visitors. I wish I had the original post by David Ryskalczyk reporting his extensive solution. Here’s what I can manually recreate.
… I figured that maybe this was a software issue. I proceeded to clean install 10.12 on a USB drive — no issues; then 10.11 on a USB drive — *also* no issues! Seems to be software. From there I started isolating things — first with kexts, which turned out to be inconclusive, then with daemons (looking in /Library/LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents to see what was installed and running). After removing a bunch of stuff I did additional testing and confirmation to figure out exactly what was causing the problem, and sure enough, it was the Leap Motion runtime!…Hopefully this can be fixed so the Leap Motion drivers can successfully coexist with these USB hubs. … I suspect the real cause is that the Leap Motion runtime is tripping up a bug in the Apple drivers.
Thanks for sharing your experience — I came across this page because I have MULTIPLE USB 3.0 hubs that worked fine under Yosemite, but El Crapitan broke them all and made them behave VERY inconsistently in exactly the manner you describe. Very frustrating, with seemingly no upside to whatever engineering changes were made.
I’ve had hard drives disconnect sporadically, low-power devices that are plugged in flicker a hub’s lights with no rhyme or reason, etc.
I haven’t found a confirmed solution to this, just scattered observations from those like us who need many USB devices to work. Some people with Hackintoshes have done this: https://github.com/RehabMan/OS-X-USB-Inject-All but I’m unclear on whether it would benefit us.
I even bought a USB 2.0 hub (with 7 ports) to fix the disconnecting. This didn’t fix it. I simply don’t know what the solution is. Hope any commenters have a suggestion?
As of 2016-05-03, I do not believe that Apple has even acknowledged it is a problem.
Just purchased a new MacBook Air with El Capiton. USB Flash drives were working fine until yesterday and now neither USB port will recognize the Flash Drive (7 different ones). They all appear and function correctly on other Apple products.
It is so disappointing that Apple has not resolved this problem after the many months that it has been an issue. I have tried the suggested resets with no resolution.
I have these issues with El Capitan 10.11.6 and I do NOT have LeapMotion installed.
With a previous hub, I thought it was a hardware defect so I got a new one. Now I’m experiencing the same issues with this one, about 4-5 weeks after purchasing it… really weird!
Same here, Nick, both on my desktop Mac at work, and on my powerbook at home. It works to plug in a 2.0 cable instead, but then the speed is 2.0 speed as well. I have yet to find a solution, and this is frankly rather unsafe (and irresponsible) because I back up via USB.
Same issue for me, using the Anker 13 port hub on OS X 10.11.6 iMac late 2012. The Anker hub worked fine until yesterday. USB 2.0 flash drives still work but USB 3.0 drives do not mount; the blue lights on the hub light up when drives are plugged in but they flash every 10 seconds or so. I do not have Leap Motion on my iMac.
Waking a Mac through a device connected to a USB 3 hub, e.g. a wired keyboard, is meant to be broken. Try waking it using a BT mouse and see if devices keep working.
I’ve got an Anker 3 port USB-3 hub with built-in gigabit ethernet adaptor. (This is with a USB 3.0/3.1 A plug on the hub, NOT a USB-C connected hub). I’ve noticed that after some number of days the performance of the Ethernet falls to about 25Mb/s download speeds from the usual 95Mb/s download. If I unplug and replug the USB port, it starts working again at the higher speed. (I have a 125Mb/s Internet service, but this particular computer is connected by way of a 100Mb/s switch. So 95Mb/s is an expected upper bound for the normal performance.)
Now what’s really strange as I was debugging this is that when the Ethernet is operating in this degraded mode, it seems to “work” fine.. that is, I can run ping tests to local devices and don’t experience any packet loss. Not sure if there’s some latency waking up the driver when traffic arrives, or some other weirdness.
Same problem for me as well. Drives drop off, and the only show back up if I disconnect my usb hub (data and power), power off the drive, and then power everything back on.
Now, this doesn’t exactly solve the problem, because after a while (hours, days) the computer shuts itself off. Bad enough, but then when I reboot the drive is again missing. And also, it seems when it goes to sleep, it wakes up also in the bad state of the drive missing.
I do not have LeapMotion. I’m on OSX 10.11.6 on a 2015 imac.
I’m wondering if I should upgrade to Sierra, but that could have it’s own problems, and perhaps the issue is hw not sw?
BTW, perhaps unrelated, the Bluetooth also keeps dropping out. I have to have a hard-wired mouse to re-connect my BT mouse and keyboard. This happens whenever the computer wakes up from sleep.
What horrible QA and reliability Apple has now.
Found this thread – I have a 7 port Anker, worked like a charm for many years, then I did an Apple update today (Safari 10.0.3 and iTunes 12.5.5) and the hub immediately stopped working upon reboot.
It’s taken me one hour and 8 minutes to get to this point. Ridiculous.
I called Anker’s support – the rep was slightly befuddled (said the update might be a coincidence) and didn’t have any known solutions, but did actually recommended unplugging power from the hub for a few hours to allow it to reset. I did this, and low and behold it’s working again. Quite remarkable. The hub was purchased in 2014.
I have a StarTech hub and found a plug/unplug got it working. The problem just started this week (I did not update to Catalina)
My second Anker 7 port.
The first one crashed after a few months of use (ports failing, one by one). Anker very kindly replaced the unit. Everything hunky-dory until I repartioned the iMac (5k Retina, late 2014, OS X 10.11.6) to test out Sierra. After deleting and reclaiming the partition… BAM! No more Anker hub. Same as others have reported; disks fine, hub lights up (I can still use the 3 additional charging ports) but the iMac doesn’t want to come out and play.
Although neither Sierra nor LeapMountain (whatever that is) isn’t needed to replicate the bug, perhaps something intrinsic to both trigger it. I wouldn’t hold off installing Sierra for the sake of a hub, but if you’re adamant about continuing to use your Anker, I’d hold off until someone has an effective and replicable fix. Personally, I’ll just jump ship to another port manufacturer until Apple can be bothered to fix the problem.
I have the same issues. Using HooToo HT-UH005 USB 3.0 4-Port Hub which has worked perfectly for some time then after updating to MacOS Sierra, had horrible issues with an external drive disconnecting.
I’ve since then balanced my power load:
External Drive + USB to Ethernet adapter are through my monitor’s HUB.
Removed the second monitor USB hub all together
Use the HooToo to power only Printer,Mouse,Keyboard.
My problems have been solved. Maybe I had too many hubs, maybe something was overloaded. I don’t know.
I had the same problem with a completely different USB hub, after some digging, I found a Samsung USB Driver installed as part of a Samsung mobile software. Removing that seems to have solved the issue!
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.devguru.ssconnservice.plist
/Library/LaunchAgents/ss_conn_service (or something to that effect)
I’m also still having the same Problem, complete with the wierd ‘If it breaks on one Mac it breaks on all of them, but works fine under windows’. The only diffrence is that the HUB does not light up when a USB 3.0 Harddrive is plugged into the Port.
I do not have LeapMotion installed. Never have.
My Imac is on El Capitan 10.11.6 and exhibited the Problem first, but after that it also occured on my Yosemite 10.10.5 Macbook Pro.
What irks me is that the drives will even spin up when connected to the HUB but just refuse to mount. They all have external power plugs, so it’s not just that they are getting power by being plugged. there is some kind of data connection being established, but it wont work. They mount just fine directly, though. Similarily USB 2.0 devices mount and work fine through the hub.
This is infuriating.
I found your blog and I hv just uninstalled Leap Motion apps and everything seems like working flawlessly now.
Thank you so much !!
Has this ever been fixed? I just picked up a 10 port Anker hub (the one with the charger port) – it worked for a few days and then the dropouts started… now none of the ports will work at all, on both of my macs (running 10.11.6).
Super annoying. Seems the latest internet rumblings about this were 6 months ago, but no clear answer if this bug was ever finished up.
FWIW I don’t have leap motion at all, and have tried PRAM and SMC which didn’t help. Nothing on Ankers site to download. Frustrating AF!
This is not only on 3rd party hubs. Seems like my Mac keyboard with its built-in hub. I have to unplug and replug it in. El Capitan seems a bit unstable even now.
The same is happening on a brand new iMac 2017 model running Sierra and a 7 port powered USB 3 hub, drops connections etc…
Same here with my Atolla 7 port USB 3.0 hub on a brand new iMac 2017 running Sierra. It’s only intermittent, but I’m worried it’s a sign of bad things to come.
There are just so many of these sorts of strange things that we’re seeing on MacOS that I never see on my Windows 10 machine. (More crashes in the first 3 days on my iMac than in the last 18 months on my PC).
I got to this page because I have a Targus 7 port usb hub, which up to now I’ve used for connecting hard disks. Today, I decided to connect USB keyboard and Mouse through it, coming from an ATEN DVI splitter. When I plugged the hub in, the mac (laptop – 2014) became slow and erratic. I rebooted, unplugged all the hard disks so was left with the mouse and keyboard, which both worked at the login screen and then completely DIDN’T work anything after that – even as guest user. El Cap 10.11.6
Well, I do not have a hint of Leap Motion in my system and I do have this issue. Both on USB 3.0 and 3.1 PCI-E -cards.
What came new in El Capitan – SIP?
I had the same problem however I found a strange workaround. I plugged one of those amazon usb 2.0 extension hubs into the 3.0 7 port usb hub and it now reads external hdd from that. Strange but it seems using that to convert the Hdd from usb 3.0 to 2.0 using that fixes the problem. This is the link to the amazon hub I used:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-4-Port-Ultra-Mini-Bus-powered/dp/B003M0NURK/
It’s not a workaround Chris, it’s the same issue everyone else has – you are effectively downgrading to usb 2.0 connection so you lose the usb3.0 transfer speed, and instead get that of 2.0. It’s interesting to hear that it still doesn’t mind a usb3.0 ‘middleman’, a good clue to the bigger puzzle.
I have a macPro 2009 flashed for 2010 so Sierra (and now High Sierra) can operate. I have a USB 3.0 PCI-X 4 port card installed which has been working well since at least Yosemite.I have one port connected to an m-beat 7 port (USB 2.0 2ports, the rest USB 3.0) powered hub. For me, disconnects started in Sierra. Every so often the dive(s) attached to my hub would disconnect and reconnect, whether they be USB drives or Hard drives. I tried everything written, including installing 3rd party kexts, disconnecting the power to the hub etc. I even bought a new m-beat “just in case”. I then did some research and in the end purchased a TP-Link UH720 powered 7 port hub (with 2 extra charging ports). This unit is powered by a 12Volt power source, which means it is stepped down to 5v somewhere before going to the out ports. This, I think is the cruncher. Hubs with a 12v supply tend to be more stable. Since installing the TP-Link, it has been rock steady over 48 hours with no drop puts whatsoever.
Hi Desmond, the anker I use is also 12v powered and completely refuses to work on usb3 connection.
May I ask if your TP-Link still works?
Also, on a side note: does it make a fairly audible high-pitch sound from its power adapter etc? Read a lot of complaints about it in that department.
i have a late 2015 27″ imac (bought in early 2017) running sierra 10.12.6 and i bought a 7-port hub when i purchased the computer. it was fine for a while then started dropping out. it became constant by october. i bought hhusali 7-post replacement. it’s junk. wasn’t recognized at all.
i took the hint from the above post about 12v power supplies and bought this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K9X9DLO/
immediate success. let’s hope it’s permanent.
Same issue here.
2012 Mac Pro Tower,
El Capitan 10.11.05 ,
4 x usb3.0 ports on a pci express card at the back,
Anker 7-port usb3.0 hub with two charging ports and 12V power connected to one of the usb3.0 ports.
Everything was working for perfectly fine for some two years. All of a sudden a few months ago I started experiencing disconnects of drives via usb hub, same as everyone else here.
– every drive works when connected directly to the usb3 PCI
– Samsung monitor usb3 hub works perfectly fine and drives connect to it
– the only thing that doesnt work is the anker hub
– it does work when connected to any of the 5 native usb2 ports across the mac pro
At a complete loss. The only thing that I believe has changed around that time was some kind of an update to itunes, safari or both.
ps I should also add that all the usb3.0 ports work flawlessly when utilized at once, meaning I can have 3 external drives + a monitor’s 2 x usb 3.0 hub with another 2 drives connected, all at the same time without any issues whatsoever.
The issue only exists when trying to use a ‘regular’ (i.e. non-monitor) powered external usb 3.0 hub.
Also a note on the point of bluetooth dropouts someone was making earlier – I know that the usb3 ports can have interfere with frequencies of the bluetooth hence two are correlated.
Come to think of it I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple nerfed something on the usb3 side to alleviate for the bluetooth issues. It may also be why they are now on usb c-type without looking to go back.
Just a guess.
I have an ORICO M3H7 USB 3.0 7-Port HUB.
Mi MacBook Pro mid 2012 didn’t recognize it as a USB 3 HUB and appeared as USB 2 instead.
Then I realized that the USB extension cable I was using was an old USB2.0 one and that was one of the problems.
Also, having inserted an USB 2.0 Thumb drive in the Hub when connecting to the computer also can affect how the computer recognizes the hub.
Powering off and on the hub before connecting also helps.
Now my hub works perfectly as USB 3.0
I am using a late 2014 Mac Mini – with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse.
I started using a Quantum Zero USB 3.0 hub about a year back — initially it seemed to work fine — but about 6 months back started having problems with Wifi connectivity (dropping or not connecting easily), and recently with my keyboard and mouse working very erratically. After trying various combinations, I found that removing the USB hub solved the problem. I though it was a USB power issue as mentioned in some posts and got an externally powered Quantum Zero USB 3.0 hub — no change. After coming across the following article today (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-serial-bus/usb3-frequency-interference-paper.html) on 2.4 GHz interference, I changed the USB hub’s data cable to an old printer cable and the problem has disappeared (likely i will not get the USB 3.0 speeds as the connectors is not USB 3.0 compliant now) — clearly indicating that EMI is the problem — due to poor shielding or a poor quality cable and connectors.
I also believe the Macs seem to have more problems – maybe their USB and Wifi circuits are poorly shielded.
I had this same problem using an Anker 4 port hub on two iMacs. Impossible to solve, I thought. The perfect solution? Put it in the wastebasket. Don’t waste any time on it. Those problems are now gone.
I do have an Anker 10 (?) port 3.0 hub attached to the same iMac. It works fine.
I have had an Anker USB 3.0 hub with 7 ports and 3 charging ports for two or three years and only recently got it working properly with my MacBook Pro running El Capitan. All my problems turned out to be USB 3.0 cable related. Initially, both USB 2.0 and 3.0 devices would randomly disconnect. I eventually found that this was due to a manufacturing fault in the USB 3.0 type A to B cable that came with the hub (a dry joint on pin 1 of the type B connector). An alternative longer cable was a better- USB 2.0 device stayed connected but USB 3.0 devices still randomly disconnect. I checked the new cable for continuity and found two high-speed Rx/Tx lines had bad connections at the Type A connector. From an examination of the connector it looked like the strain relief system was so bad that the connections broke off after short period of use.
Two add to the confusion I also found that cables on a pair of USB drives were intermittent as well. This was not that surprising because these cables are vey thin and get a lot of flexing when regular connected and disconnected to a laptop.