Back in Britain, just before we returned to Kazakhstan this year, I purchased a USB3 kit (basically a new adaptor) for our 1Tb portable hard drive, and a USB3 PCIe card for our PC. The main reason being to improve the transfer speed of the drive, but also to ease some of the bandwidth congestion that occurs when you have around 30 USB ports in use. Any device that might saturate the bandwidth available in our USB2 hubs was moved to this USB3 card.
Unfortunately, I hit a small snag – if the PC was hibernated§ , when the PC was woken up, the USB3 card pretended to no longer exist. As you can guess, this meant the hard drives plugged in would not work. The only way to make the PC and USB3 card admit to each other that they had an existing physical relationship and that communications would be a good idea was to shutdown the PC and start up again, properly.
Anyway, I tried a few things to get the system working properly, but got no results. Eventually I was annoyed enough to look for a solution again, and chanced upon the drivers available here. My card uses the same chipset, so although the model wasn’t an exact match (no firmware upgrade possible), it was close enough for the new drivers to work fine. So now, when the PC hibernates, everything still works when you wake it up! Should there be a power cut, the UPS initiates a hibernation, once the battery level dips below 30%; now power cuts don’t mean I have to close browsers with dozens of tabs and IM windows awaiting a reply before I can access all our data once more 🙂
§ – like shutting a PC down, no power is required, but when you next turn the PC on, the boot up can be a little faster, and all your applications and windows are restored.