Windows 10 corrupting USB drives

General Discussions
1

This is going to be wordy so anyone suffering same will understand everything I’ve tried.

So in my quest for a more power efficient Plex server, I recently setup an HP Elitebook as my new server. See this post: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/278382/my-new-server-a-gasp-laptop#latest

A few days after copying all my existing media to the new drives, I was having issues with Plex telling me the media wasn’t available. Funny, I just watched part of that TV Series yesterday. I remote into the server and open explorer. To my dismay, half of my television series folders are not there and some that are, cannot be accessed. WUT? Digging deeper, a lot of my Movie folders have the same issue. :frowning:

My first assumption was i got a bad drive BUT my TV Series and my Movies are kept on separate drives. Is it possible I got two bad drives? Running chkdsk /f I see TONS of issues. Long story short, I fear one of several scenarios.

  1. I got two bad drives (unlikely)
  2. My Laptop has a USB issue
  3. There are problems with the external cases I am using
  4. I have a virus

Step 1. Boot off a pen drive, do a triple redundant virus/malware scan. CLEAN
Step 2. Connect my 4tb Seagate USB drive and run read/writes tests for 24hrs. CLEAN
Step 3. Change from MBR to GPT on external drives and start all over again.

So I hook the drives to the old server , wipe them and start fresh. Copy 12tb of media to the new drives again, move them to the laptop server.

Two days later… files vanishing and drive corruption again. :frowning:

The ThermalTake Max 5G hard drive cases I was using were not rated for 6tb drives but I had been reading people saying they had no issues using them. Not to take chances, I ordered a Noontec-TerraMaster D4-310 to hold my drives setup in a JBOD mode.

ONCE AGAIN, I hook the drives to the old server , wipe them copy 12tb of media to them and move them to the laptop server.

Three days later… yup, you guessed it. Going… going… GONE. Total drive corruption on both drives.

Doing some research, it SEEMS this MIGHT come down to the fact that my old server is a Windows 7 machine and the new one, Windows 10. There are threads about people suffering a similar plight when using a USB hard drive on both a Windows 7 machine and a Windows 10 machine.

Currently I have the media once again being transferred to the new drives. On the laptop server I’m going to try disabling all USB sleep/power saving modes, disable write caching and whatever other voodoo settings I can come up with. My fingers are crossed.

2

You should add this experience report to your https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/278382/my-new-server-a-gasp-laptop#latest thread.

Because your issue is one that appears much more often with Laptop devices than with desktops. Laptops often have much more aggressive power saving settings.

Hence I for one cannot recommend to use laptops as a “server” type device. Particularly not for Plex which sometimes require the CPU to run on 100% load for hours.
That is some load for which laptops are not built. It will lead to the diminutive fans running at full speed which leads to an early wear-out of the fan bearings and a quick accumulation of dust inside.
Which then leads to an early death of the device, not to mention the noise.

3

@OttoKerner said:
You should add this experience report to your https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/278382/my-new-server-a-gasp-laptop#latest thread.

Because your issue is one that appears much more often with Laptop devices than with desktops. Laptops often have much more aggressive power saving settings.

Hence I for one cannot recommend to use laptops as a “server” type device. Particularly not for Plex which sometimes require the CPU to run on 100% load for hours.
That is some load for which laptops are not built. It will lead to the diminutive fans running at full speed which leads to an early wear-out of the fan bearings and a quick accumulation of dust inside.
Which then leads to an early death of the device, not to mention the noise.

These laptops are enterprise level and can handle the work load. Just as I do with my other Elitebook, I’ll pull it apart from time to time to blow out dust. I’ve done a lot of transcoding on that one over the past two years and so far, so godo. I’m also looking to ad an opolar to it. I’ve done lots of testing and the fans rarely run at full speed.

I also have the Max CPU set to 80% to keep it cooler and have had zero issues transcoding several movies at once. There’s only two of us in the house and most of the time, we’re watching the same movie.

Noise… my big server made FAR more noise than the Elitebook does.

Anyway I agree I need to link this to my other post.

More research suggests that maybe I need to initialize the drives on the Win10 machine, put them on the Win7 machine to get the media loaded on and then back to the Win10 machine. We’ll see…

4

I have to second what @OttoKerner said about laptops. They’re really not replacements for servers and especially so if expected to run 18-24 hours a day. Also true of your average desktop/laptop/external USB drives - they’re not engineered as a performance solution or designed for continuous operation.

Using them as such is going to lead to premature failure.

5

@dduke2104 said:
I have to second what @OttoKerner said about laptops. They’re really not replacements for servers and especially so if expected to run 18-24 hours a day. Also true of your average desktop/laptop/external USB drives - they’re not engineered as a performance solution or designed for continuous operation.

Using them as such is going to lead to premature failure.

I have not shut my original Elitebook down in over a year. We used to use them in the IT department at my old job. Some had been running for 4 years 24/7 as web hosts for remote sales people. These things don’t die. And, if it does, I’ll replace it. This isn’t the issue my thread was posted for.

The drives becoming corrupt is the subject. These are desktop drives inside Terra-Master RAID box, exactly what they’re made for. Besides it’s happening to people with desktops too.

6

I am updating this for those that may run into a similar problem, especially with a laptop similar to mine. If this thread gets indexed in Google I’d like people to have the info.

I still have issues with my USB drives suddenly being identified as RAW. I’ve read lots of threads on this, tried lots of theories and yet, have found nothing that works. Yes, many of the threads I read occur on laptops more often than desktops but seeing as how more users with laptops would be using external storage, that may explain why many threads are focused on them.

I have;
-Disabled ALL USB power management
-Disabled ALL SLEEP modes
-Disabled ALL Write Caching

  1. I was initially using FastCopy to duplicate files so to narrow down things, I used Explorer this time. Once rebooted, one drive showed NTFS but chkdsk reported lots of lost index entries. The second drive initially loaded but showed being RAW. Downloaded and ran TestDisk which didn’t even see the drive and eventually the entire drive vanished from Windows. Within hours the first drive was shown to be empty.

  2. A few people have suggested that there is an inherent difference in the way Win7 writes to USB drives vs. Win10. I was skeptical but desperate so, I partitioned, formatted and copied files all on the Win10 machine. Once again, media copied over. Initial appearances seemed promising. HOWEVER, after a reboot running CHKDSK proved me wrong. There were index entries that were lost but only a few compared to previous issues. Once run, 99% of my files were still intact.

  3. As said, I have an HP 8770W Elitebook which is 4 years old. Drivers are not exactly up to date in all respects. Perusing device manager I came across an entry with a ? named “HP Mobile Data Protection Sensor.” Doing research I came across **THIS **thread. Basically it monitors the laptops health and if it senses an issue it sends a command to external drives telling them to park the heads. The Windows 10 update blocks the existing driver from loading saying there are issues with it. After reading the thread, I’ve downloaded and installed the driver. Remarkably when I rebooted the laptop, the second drive (the same drive TestDisk couldn’t even see) showed up. Running chkdsk on the drive produced no errors on any of the 3 partitions. Could this one driver be the issue?

Status as of 07/26/17: So far, so good but it’s early in the process. Only a couple of days of read/writes to the drives will determine if I was successful.

7

Any time you have older hardware running a newer OS where drivers aren’t available, you will more than likely run into issues just like this. Glad you were able to find a driver that would work with Windows 10 that will hopefully be the fix to your problem.

8

@kegobeer-plex said:
Any time you have older hardware running a newer OS where drivers aren’t available, you will more than likely run into issues just like this. Glad you were able to find a driver that would work with Windows 10 that will hopefully be the fix to your problem.

I had no issues with Win7 but I HAD to have the newest… I feel like I should have left well enough alone. :confused:

If this fails I may move to a Linux install and see how that goes. I fear moving the Plex database over to Linux might be more of an issue though. Still have my big server to fall back on in the meantime.

9

Update 07/28/17: It’s been two days since restoring SOME media, etc. I’m not dumping everything on until I’m sure it’s stable. I had one problem of lost indexes immediately after restoring but it was only a few files. I let CHKDSK correct it.

My feelings are that even tho I have NO SLEEP, NO POWER MANAGEMENT on USB ports, the external drives still spin down for some reason. The Terra-Master cases do not support sleeping so I don’t get what’s going on. I installed a program called KeepAliveHD which writes a small txt file to each drive and set it to every 30 seconds. I’ve kept an Admin Command line open and run CHKDSK on each drive from time to time and especially after copying new media to them. Crystal Disk Info shows temps of 32c which is comfy.

I know this seems like a lot to go through but I’m a problem solver and do not let inanimate objects get the better of me. :slight_smile:

Anyway, so far so good and if this stabilizes I’ll order two more drives and go RAID1 since the Terra-Master case can hold 4 drives. Attaching an image of my desktop setup for the hell of it.

10

@bigbadwolf said:
My feelings are that even tho I have NO SLEEP, NO POWER MANAGEMENT on USB ports, the external drives still spin down for some reason.

Did you order “green” drives perchance? Those will spin down on their own volition.

Anyway, so far so good and if this stabilizes I’ll order two more drives and go RAID1 since the Terra-Master case can hold 4 drives.

IMHO, you’d be better off without any array and just do a regular file backup.

11

@OttoKerner said:
Did you order “green” drives perchance? Those will spin down on their own volition.

No, they are Toshiba HDWE160XZSTA which are 7200 rpm drives. They are low power but are not green that I’m aware of.

IMHO, you’d be better off without any array and just do a regular file backup.

I did this on the old server but my issue with this is another process running. I was using a collection of 2 & 4 tb drives so if one died, I wouldn’t lose everything. I have a dock I use to pop backup drives (kept in a fireproof safe) in when I add a quantity of media. Now I’m using 2 x 6tb drives so each drive contains a lot more and if one dies, I’m screwed. I was thinking with RAID everything will be duplicated should I not get to backing up inbetween.

This is a new method and I’m obviously still working out the bugs but it has cut my electricity use by 3/4.

12

Update 08/01/17: After several days of stability, once again drives ended up being corrupted and eventually RAW. This occurred after I discovered some movies, although the exact same size as the original, were not playable. So I hooked them to my old Win7 server to copy them over.

The thread HERE has dozens of people with both desktops and laptops having the same issue moving external storage between Win10 and other operating systems.

It seems Win10s FASTBOOT option may be to blame. Thus, I am once more recopying media to the drives. If this doesn’t work, I’ll be going back to Win7.

13

Have you turned fast boot off? https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

14

@WilhelmStroker said:
Have you turned fast boot off? https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

LOL did you post this before reading the last post in my thread? :smiley: FASTBOOT is now off.

Either way wish you had posted this a week ago. :cold_sweat:

15

Update 08/01/17: I was so sure turning off fastboot was going to solve the problem. After waiting since yesterday for data to be restored, I decided to SAFELY EJECT the drives before rebooting the laptop. Once I ejected them I remembered I wanted to copy something over and powered them back up. One of the 6tb drives was reported as not partitioned. :’-( Hooking it to another machine made no difference.

At this point I can only think of it being one of two things… the 8770w I bought to be the server has a bad USB 3.0 port OR something got trashed installing Win10. So, since my existing laptop was the exact same model and specs, I swapped internal drives around to make my existing machine the server.

At this point it would be easy to say screw it and just buy a SFF PC but I’m known as a stubborn mule and I’ll ride this out. I will go back to Win7 if I have to!

Side Note:
I will say that I like the Terra-Master RAID box. It has two USB 3.0 ports on the back of it so I can plug my hard drive dock into it, pop backups in and copy to the new drives. Using FastCopy I’m currently pushing 118 - 122MB/s on the restore.

16

I would do a memory test on your server.
I prefer memtest86+ but it only supports legacy mode(luckily, most systems still have it).
PassMark has made a version that supports UEFI mode if you cannot switch to legacy/BIOS-compatibility mode.

memtest86+
http://www.memtest.org

PassMark MemTest86
https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm

17

@NewPlaza said:
I would do a memory test on your server.

Thanks for the input but I did this last week and it came back clean. I use GPT/NTFS by default but I’ve also tried MBR & exFAT with no better results.

Last night as I started restoring media to the drives. I disconnected, reconnected, rebooted, etc. The drives came up as they should each time. As the drives fill up I will keep experimenting the same way.

Another note about the 8770w laptop that makes it a great machine. It can handle 3 internal 2.5" drives. By default it has a spot for 2 internals but I bought an adapter that lets me swap out the DVD drive for a hard drive. So inside I have
-512gb SSD as the boot drive
-256gb SSD set as a work drive
-2tb hard drive set as a NAS

18

@bigbadwolf said:

@NewPlaza said:
I would do a memory test on your server.

Thanks for the input but I did this last week and it came back clean.

May I ask what testing software you used?

19

@NewPlaza said:
May I ask what testing software you used?

First I ran the built in Windows10 memory test for a quick check. Then I used the memory test built into the laptop which is a bit more exhaustive. Both of those passed. I also have a bootable Linux pen drive with tools on it that I’ve been using for years. I have memtest86 on it and if this fails again, I will let it run overnight.

Before I started setting this up as a server, I did quite a bit of installing, benchmarking, pushing the CPU/GPU to test heat dissipation, running video conversions, installing VirtualBox with 2 versions of Linux, etc. There were times all 4 cores of the CPU were pinned at 100% for an hour straight. You would think if there were any memory issues I would have seen at least one BSOD or at least have an app crash. Other than the drive issue it has been rock solid. No crashes and nothing else funny.

20

For testing purposes, I hooked up one of my backup drives created on the Win7 machine. I only use this drive to backup part of my movies and it’s never given me an issue in 3 years. I ran CHKDSK on the Win7 machine before disconnecting and it returned zero errors. Here is what Windows 10 did to it… (yes I have another copy of this drive)

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