USB 3 device freezes xserve

I too have seen this, on two different xserves, one running Lion and the other running Mountain Lion. The crash is happening with the USB io subsystem and making kernel panick. That is, it happens before the OS attempts to mount the volumes on the drive. I have tried drives formatted as HFS+ journaled and as NTFS, with same results.

It happens with a 4TB Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive. But not with a 3TB Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive. Both drives work fine with a 2012 iMac running Lion.

I have a Mountain Lion xServe that I can play with a bit to see what I can find.

Also I found another thread with basically the same issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5219919?answerId=24934195022#24934195022

I've also tried now all three ports, and three kinds of cable. A USB 3.0 micro b, USB 2.0 micro b cable, and a USB 3.0 with adjunct power.

Ok. This is weird. I put 10.7 boot image installer onto a partition on the 4TB drive, and it showed up in the early boot screen (hold down option on boot). It gets more interesting, I was able to boot from this partition.

This suggests to me that there is an issue with USB subsystem in OS X, but that the problem does not affect the 10.7 boot installer. Possibly this is due to the way the volume is mounted initially, as a boot volume, or it could be the implementation of USB kernel extensions in 10.7.5 and 10.8.5. Both the crashing boxes I tried were fully patched, but I think this boot image is from 10.7 or 10.7.4 days.

In a moment I will test with 10.6, and see if it works there.

It works with 10.6.8. I think that there are likely issues with USB kexts in 10.7.5 and 10.8.5. I suspect that earlier versions might work. It may be possible to copy kexts from older versions of 10.7/10.8 to get it working.