ThunderboltEX 3 card not working properly?

Stuart Kershaw

New member
I've recently purchased a video editing workstation for my business and since the office is at the moment split between people using Mac's and PC's most of our external drives are LaCie thunderbolt drives. Hence why the new workstation has a ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 PCie card built in.

We have several other PC's in the office in which we've manually installed a ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 card as well as an Gigabyte Alpine Ridge v2.0 Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Card, and after much trouble we've managed to make them work with all the devices we have. We were quite excited when we've found out that PC Specialist started adding a Thunderbolt 3 card into their computer builds, thinking that this will save us all the trouble of manually adding a card ourselves and making it work.

Although the ThunderboltEX 3 card works perfectly in terms of identifying if a device is connected through the thunderbolt port, it does not allow us to access any of the drives. It does not appear in the Disk Management tab, yet it does appear in the thunderbolt software under attached devices. It is essentially connected yet not accessible. We've tried connecting a variety of drives to the card and what we've notices is that the only way the card would let us access the content of the device was if the drive had a USB type C (USB 3.1) port and once connected through that, the device would appear as a working drive. Which got us thinking that the Thunderbolt card might be forced to act as a USB 3.1 port from the BIOS settings.

After doing several passes through the BIOS settings, that is not the case. The ASUS BIOS Thunderbolt software settings does not have a line specifying whether the card is acting as a Thunderbolt port or USB 3.1 port ( a setting that is available on some of our other PCs in the office, which might have made this problem go away).

The Thunderbolt Software has been updated to the latest version, as well as the firmware. I've tried disabling the Thunderbolt in BIOS and enabling it again after several restarts. At the point from my experience the only thing left would be to take out the ThunderboltEX 3 Card run the computer without and then add it back in. It sometimes solved the situation on our other machines however that was only in the case that the card would not work all together. I decided to post something on the forum before we go ahead and remove it from the computer if everything else fails.

I have to stress again that the card IS WORKING, and identifying the devices plugged into it, but if they are connected through the Thunderbolt port and not the USB 3.1 port of the external drive, it does not allow us to access the drive.

If anyone can shed some light on the situation it would be much appreciated. Also if you need additional information about the set up let me know.

Cheers.
 

Stuart Kershaw

New member
Hi Oussebon,

Thanks for the quick reply, here are the details of the PC:

Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™ i9 14 Core Processor i9-7940X (3.1GHz) 19.25MB Cache

Motherboard ASUS® WS X299 PRO: ATX, USB 3.1, SATA 6 GB/s

Memory (RAM) 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 16GB)

Graphics Card 8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 - DVI, HDMI, 3x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!

1nd Hard Disk 4TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 5400RPM, 256MB CACHE

1st M.2 SSD Drive 512GB INTEL® 760p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (upto 3230MB/sR | 1625MB/sW)

Power Supply CORSAIR 750W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET

Processor Cooling Corsair H60 2018 Hydro Series High Performance CPU Cooler

USB Options ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 PCI-E CARD
 
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