USB device support

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The AIX® operating system supports Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices.

The AIX operating system supports the following types of third-party USB devices and IBM® USB devices:
  • USB mass storage class
    • Flash drive
    • Disk drive
    • Optical drive (Blu-ray, DVD, and CD-ROM)
    • Removable Disk Drives (RDX)
    • External and portable hard disk drives
  • USB Human Interface Device Class (HID)
    • Keyboard
    • Mouse
Note: The AIX operating system does not support USB printers.
Starting from AIX 7.3 Technology Level 1, USB mass storage devices that have a capacity greater than 2 TB are supported, but have the following limitations:
  • The accessible capacity for USB devices (block size 512 bytes) that have greater than 2 TB size is limited to the first 2 TB. The accessible capacity for USB devices (block size 4 KB) that have greater than 16 TB size is limited to the first 16 TB. You can get the block size of the USB device by using the getconf command.
  • USB devices that have capacity greater than 2 TB do not support the mksysb and udfcreate commands regardless of the block size of the USB device.
In AIX 7.3 Technology Level 1, and later, Seagate and Western Digital USB devices were used to validate the support of USB devices that have capacity greater than 2 TB.
The AIX operating system does not support all the possible third-party USB devices because some third-party USB devices might not be recognized by the AIX operating system. Consider the following scenarios when the AIX operating system does not support the third-party USB devices:
  • Insufficient power supply from the Power® Systems USB port.
  • Missing quirks for the USB device. Third-party USB devices might have to add quirks if USB devices are not configured or are not working by default. For more information about adding quirks, see AIX USB device Quirks.