MP 7,1 Trouble with powerless USB PCIe Card

[CatoTheElder]

Hi,

I have the 7,1 MP and need an additional USB type A I/O card. I have so far tried the Sonett USB3-4PM-E Allegro as well as the Inatek KT4005. So far to almost no avail. The Sonett had 2 of 4 ports functioning, including power. The other 2 were dead. The Inatek works on all 4 during system startup (I can see the RGB on the mouse lighting up), but as soon as I am logged in it stops working.
I have put in in the second slot below the built-in I/O card.

I am now wondering if there might not be enough power left for this PCI lane. In the third lane I put a NVMe PCIe card. That's all besides the GPU.

Has anyone made similar or different experiences? Any ideas on an alternative?
Should I rather go for a SATA powered card?

Thanks a lot!
[automerge]1589897097[/automerge]
Oh, and I forgot: Sonett-card-attached devices could not wake up the Mac from sleep mode :-(

 

[SayCheese]

That's odd. I have an Innatek that's working fine. Not sure what model it is but I've got 4x USB 3 ports.

 

[CatoTheElder]

Hmm - odd indeed. Seems to be the same card.
Do you have any other PCIe cards plugged in?

To make things worse: I just got a kernel panic when waking up from sleep mode:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff8013e91b2c): Sleep transition timed out after 180 seconds while calling power state change callbacks. Suspected bundle: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily.

The "IOUSBHostFamily" strongly points to the USB card... sigh.
Oh, and after that I couldn't get boot camp to start up properly. Only when I removed the Innatek card I could get past the black screen or (tried several times) the autorepair screen.

Too much trouble for 4 USB ports :-(

 

[CatoTheElder]

I think I will try some combinations, like removing the NVMe PCIe Card and/or switching the lanes.
And I have ordered a SATA powered USB card now...

 

[CatoTheElder]

To keep you guys updated: things are getting weird(er)
First off: I ordered a SATA powered card just to discover that it's connectors do not fit (out of the box), and so I sent it back.

I then tried again the Inateck without the NVMe card next to it, made no difference:
On system startup all USB devices seem to power up (mouse + audio interface light up), I can even move the mouse on the login screen. After logging in everything stops to work, the mouse goes black.

Therefore I took a look at the console and saw some strange USB related errors and notifications both for audio and guitar interface popping up. So they somehow were recognized and the system was trying to initialize them. At the system profiler and I could see (under USB) that the Inateck card was recognized as a USB hub and that the guitar interface was connected to it. Power seemed to be no issue, as it stated that 500mA were available but only 100mA were used by the interface.

But: I could not get the interface to work. In the system preferences the sound pane was unresponsive for at least 20 seconds, but the guitar interface was listed in the end. But it did not receive any signal from the guitar, no matter what.
Switching to the Apple I/O card made it work immediately!

I then tried again with the mouse. I plugged it in and all lights went on... at first. Because as soon as I plugged in another device they went black again. And even when the lights were on I could not move the cursor.

I don't know... seems pretty odd to me. But as there are no drivers available for the Inateck card I don't know what else to try/do. So I ended up ordering the 150€ Sonett USB 3.1 card for one last trial
Let's see how that will work out... for now I can use some USB-C to USB-A adapters, but that is not my desired setup.

 

[CatoTheElder]

To bring this story to an end: I ordered the (unfortunately more expensive) Sonett 3.2 USB-A card, and it works immediately as expected! 🙃
So it seems that all the other cards were in some way either damaged or incompatible :-(
Case closed!

 

[electonic]

Darn it. I have Innatek card on my 5.1. And I am getting random Kernel Panics from sleep, too. At least I can be sure that it's the card. Thanks for reporting.