In the last few days I have been having USB freezes on my Mac, where all my USB ports seem to die, and only a restart can fix the issue. I had thought it was my beloved Microsoft Trackball Explorer that was causing the issue (as it has been known to cut in and out), and so I detached it and switched to my Kensington Trackball explorer that I bring to work, and it seemed OK today. Sure last night I had to use TechTool and restart into my emergency drive, and run diskwarrior, but I figure that is par for the course after a few hard resets. Anyway, the problem happened again today, and I decided to try something different, since I have a CalDigit USB 3 and SATA card, I tired plugging my Kengsington and Keyboard into that, and low and behold those ports still worked. Now I was in the process of rebuilding my iPhoto library, so I didn’t restart, though I should have as the computer totally hung up shortly thereafter, but I did have time to look at a System Report.
The system report was telling, as it showed all of my USB devices, but still showed my trackball and Microsoft Keyboard connected to the USB 2 port as well as the USB 3 port. Hoping it is not a hardware issue, I decided to reset the SMC, by disconnecting power for a minute, and then reset the PRAM 3 times as I restarted. So far so good, but it usually is after a restart.
Hopefully it is OK now, but we shall see.