USB devices not recognized when laptop runs on battery

Question

When I use my laptop on battery, no USB device I connect (i.e. memory stick, external hard drive or mouse) is recognized on either USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports.

I found two workarounds, which I, however, don't find satisfactory long term:

1. Plug in the device. Go into suspend. Wake up.
2. Connect the laptop to power. Plug in the device.

I tried to mess around with the BIOS settings, which has two options regarding USB: "Legacy USB Support" and "USB Mass Storage Driver Support". I have tried any combination of "disable" and "enable", but nothing helped.

Someone running Arch seems to have a similar problem, so could this have to do with the kernel?

My system:
Laptop: Asus Zenbook UX305UA
OS: elementary OS 0.4 Loki (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS)
Kernel: 4.4.0-36-generic

I have tlp installed .

EDIT: Same problem with the SD card slot.

Answer 1

Btw, I have tlp installed (I don't know if that could have to do with it...).

This may very well be the ca[u]se. I faced the same problem today after a system upgrade. I have found a workaround for this.

Plug in your drive and then run the following commands, waiting for a couple of seconds between the two:

$ sudo tlp ac
$ sudo tlp bat

These commands tell TLP to go to AC powered mode and back again to battery mode. This fixes the issue for me --- the usb drive is magically detected and (auto)mounted when TLP is in AC mode. This suggests that the underlying problem may indeed be with TLP.