Getting external USB 3.0 drives recognized

[swechsler]

Hey all, I've just built a Debian server as part of Open Media Vault (I asked this question on their forum as well, but since this is more OS related, I thought i'd get a better response here) on a Dell optiplex 9020 with 8GB of RAM and two internal SATA drives: a 120GB SSD for OS and a 500GB hard drive for data. In addition I'd like to connect an external 2TB USB 3.0 drive for media storage. The drive works fine on a Windows machine running on the same hardware. But on the Debian machine, the drive is not recognized unless I connect it to a USB 2.0 port. Is any sort of driver required to support the USB 3.0 drive? Or something else I need to configure? Help.

Uname output:

Linux mediaserver 4.14.0-0.bpo.3-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.14.13-1~bpo9+1 (2018-01-14) x86_64 GNU/Linux

[GarryRicketson]

I don't really know, but when I do a search , it looks like this is something that is common,
On Debian, Is any sort of driver required to support the USB 3.0 drive?
If nothing else, these 2 hits should give you some ideas about checking ,and troubleshooting this:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/729558/how-do-i-get-usb-3-0-driver-working-or-check-that-it-is-already-working/729565
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https://itsfoss.com/find-usb-3-port-linux/

[bw123]

I don't use it, guessing it is another debian-based os?
When you say not recognized, you mean absolutely nothing shows up in dmesg when plugging it in?

Did you try any of these?
https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=Open+Med ... recognized

[RU55EL]

What is the output of lspci?

My notebook computer, for example, has a SD card reader that requires non-free firmware. I don't use the SD card reader, so I haven't installed any non-free firmware. (In fact, I replaced the Wifi card with one that doesn't require non-free firmware, so that I don't need to use any non-free firmware.) But, if I run lspci at the command line, this is one of the lines that I get regarding the SD card reader.

Code: Select all

03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8411 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)

I am assuming that "Unassigned class" is due to the fact that there is no firmware for the device. I would think you should see something similar for USB 3. Then you can look for the required firmware.

In my case searching for "Debian RTL8411" comes up with https://packages.debian.org/stretch/firmware-realtek