by Martin » 15 Jul 2015, 16:45
Hi Marco,
Sounds like typical symptoms we have seen with some USB3.0 hosts, particularly on Windows 7 and weak/old computers.
The message you see in the UI ("firmware update required") is an artifact where the version is incorrectly reported to be zero.
On one of my computers (Interl i7 920) I use a USB3 add-on card from ASUS that has a USB controller from NEC/Renesas, it has been a pain, some firmware/drivers for this card works better that others. Oddly the latest version works worse than the one before.
Once I updated the system to Windows 8.1 things improved a bit but still some issues.
On the office PC (i5-3570k) I saw occasional disconnects when running Windows 7. Once I upgraded to Windows 8.1 it works fine.
On my new system (i7-5930K) there are no issues at all (same device).
So the first thing I would to is to check for updated drivers and firmware for the USB controller. Second would be to consider updating to Windows 8.1. By the way, what is your computer brand/model?