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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9063

Posted: 01:52pm 06 Mar 2017

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Has anyone seen this before?

Windoze 8.1 Pro 64-bit.
USB3 external DOCK and drive.

I thought it must have been the old dock causing this problem, so I replaced it with a brand new one, but still seeing the same problem.

You can be copying files to the drive in the dock fine, then from one instant to the next, the drive is just not there anymore, and windoze moans about the fact that the drive reference does not exist - and it doesn't.

Switch off the dock and back on again, and away it goes again - till next time.
There is no predictable timeframe for this. Sometimes it happens within minutes of switching on the dock, other times you can copy files for an hour or more and no problems. Replaced USB3 cables with new ones to ensure that they were not causing some weird connection issue.

Next after the brand new dock, I was thinking that this drive perhaps has a problem, so I tried about three different drives, and they ALL vanish like this in exactly the same way. Very odd.

However, you put anything else on the same USB3 port, and it works fine.
I have tried the dock on other ports, some of which work, others refuse to see the dock at all - that was the same with the OLD dock.

I don't like USB drives. Ever since they have been around, I have been fighting the damn things to get windoze to talk to them. MAC and Linux don't ever seem to have these issues. Not that I have noticed with Linux anyway.(don't really use MAC's, but I don't recall reading about USB drive issues on the MAC like you do all the time with windoze)

Anyone here got any ideas for me to try?

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

TassyJim

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Joined: 07/08/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 5905

Posted: 02:29pm 06 Mar 2017

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Make sure that the USB controller is not set to power saving mode.

Under Device manager, check the properties of all the USB controllers.
If you have something like this:

remove the tick.

This is for W10 but W8 is much the same.

I ended up with network attached storage to save that sort of problems. (There are other problems instead but a change is as good as a holiday)

JimEdited by TassyJim 2017-03-08

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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9063

Posted: 09:42pm 06 Mar 2017

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Thanks, will check that - had not thought of that, but one would imagine that if the system was talking to the drive, windoze should not try to power it off.....

...but then, windoze does so some strange things....

Yes, this is only a stop-gap measure, as the new server I am building(Linux-based with SAMBA) will have a "BACKUP" folder on it, so that I can save my backups to the network. I also backup to a local flash drive, a flash drive on my Raspberry-Pi mediaplayer, and Dropbox too, so I think I am reasonably well covered, but this sort of thing is just frustrating.

Can I deduce from your comment, that you also have had odd USB HDD problems under Windows as well?Edited by Grogster 2017-03-08

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

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