Front panel USB advertised as supporting 10 Gb/s, actually runs at 5 Gb/s

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Hi all,

A few years ago, I purchased a case (hardware details at the end) with a front panel I/O module that was advertised as having a front panel USB Type C 10 Gb/s port. To my dismay, despite it working with the internal Key-A header on my motherboard, I found that it seemed to bottleneck the write speed to my external nVME SSD to <5 Gb/s. The rear USB Type C port performed better.

I’ve decided to take another shot at troubleshooting this issue to see if this is in fact a hardware issue rather than a software one, as well as if it can be attributed to the front panel I/O module or the motherboard. While both the case & motherboard are out of warranty at this point (plus the case has been discontinued and its page unlisted from Sliger’s site), this could inform my future hardware upgrade decisions or lead to me submitting a bug report.

I’ve run the command lsusb -tv both with the SSD enclosure plugged into the front panel and the rear of the motherboard. Below are the outputs of each time I ran that command, including only the two buses which reported a connection to the drive.

What can be inferred from the below information, and what other troubleshooting steps could I take? I’ve thought about buying a Type-E to Type-C cable with USB 10 Gb/s support to see if that works, but I don’t want to buy a piece of hardware for troubleshooting if I don’t need to.

Thanks!

SSD plugged into front I/O

...
/:  Bus 002.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
...
/:  Bus 004.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 002: Dev 003, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M
        ID 0bda:9210 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL9210 M.2 NVME Adapter
    |__ Port 003: Dev 002, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 5000M
        ID 174c:3074 ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1074 SuperSpeed hub

SSD plugged into rear I/O

...
/:  Bus 002.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 002: Dev 003, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 10000M
        ID 0bda:9210 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL9210 M.2 NVME Adapter
...
/:  Bus 004.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 003: Dev 002, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 5000M
        ID 174c:3074 ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1074 SuperSpeed hub

Hardware mentioned:

Case: Sliger CL530
Motherboard: ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ax
SSD enclosure: Sabrent EC-SVNE

Edit: Corrected title to be accurate to the reported speeds

2

Upgrading the motherboard firmware from version P2.30 to P3.40 appears to have fixed the issue.

SSD plugged into front I/O (firmware P3.40)

...
/:  Bus 002.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
...
/:  Bus 004.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 002: Dev 003, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 10000M
        ID 0bda:9210 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL9210 M.2 NVME Adapter
    |__ Port 003: Dev 002, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 5000M
        ID 174c:3074 ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1074 SuperSpeed hub
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