USB device malfunctioned

I'm having a problem with my USB C hdd disconnecting for no reason while I am reading data from it.
It seems to be ok when writing to it, but if I try and read data off it it will disconnect and windows will tell me it has malfunctioned. It came with a USBC to USBA adapter which when I use it fixes the problem. There is no problem with the actual drive itself, I got a replacement sent to me from Amazon and both of them do the exact same thing.
I have tried disabling usb selective suspend in the power options as I found some sites saying this is why but that hasn't fixed it. Not surprising really as why would it try and suspend a device when it's in use....

I've had two of this exact laptop and two of this exact drive and the issue is always there. This leads me to think it's a driver thing but how to get anywhere with that?


In the event logs I can see :

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR2 during a paging operation.

Thanks, I'll try and dig out a USB and try that.

I've been trying to compare my old laptop which doesn't have this problem and this new one. The Intel USB 3.10 eXtensible host controller driver version is 10.0.19041.1 on my new laptop (where I get the issue), my old laptop which behaves fine is 10.0.18362.69. I tried copying USBXHCI.sys over to the new laptop to see if it works with the old driver but it wouldn't let me install it nor could I install the later one on my old laptop to see if that breaks it.

I tried plugging a USB A drive into my usbc hub to see if that works but it did, which makes sense because the usb drive works fine with a usb a adapter plugged into the usb c hub. I don't have any other usbc devices to try this with unfortunately.

Old laptop is 1909, had the problem on a previous one of these new laptops on 1909 too. That link reminded me I do have a windows PE live USB I can try out now.

So that environment is using 10.0.14393.0. Tried a few copy operations, all that would trigger the issue here and it was fine. I just tried from USBC to USBA and it was fine....now seeing as the PE was running from X and I copied to C maybe that's why it was fine....let me try the usbc to the X drive if I can while in the PE

Just returned from PE and couldn't make it fail.

I'm thinking I could create a new partition and install 1903 and try it ?

Will have to be dual boot, can't take the SSD out of the laptop.

I'm hoping its a buglet but was there in 1909 on this same laptop so not necessarily 2004 related.