USB woes!

One of my PCs has a hard time with external USB drives. Although folders on these drives (it's not just one drive in particular) are usually accessible with no issue (i.e. I can browse the folder structure), trying to copy files there, from the PC, for instance, mostly ends up with the drive freezing (often immediately), and/or the file transfer stopping half-way through, and/or Explorer crashing. I have tried connecting the drives via a powered hub and directly via the PC's USB ports (USB3); and the drives themselves can be AC mains-powered, or powered via the PC's USB port, it makes no difference to the problem as far as I can tell. I have tried changing the 'policies' between 'quick removal' and 'better performance', with write-caching disabled or enabled, but again, that may change the copying speed when (if) it starts, but doesn't help with everything locking up shortly thereafter.

If I use a different PC, copying almost always goes ahead swiftly and with no problems, so the PC is implicated I guess, rather than my HDD drives.

So any idea what the problem might be with the PC in question? I have had it (the problem) for ages.. not due to a recent update, for instance. I have tried updating USB drivers via Device Manager, but I just get a notice saying the best drivers are already installed. Fed up of Googling this now - maybe someone here will know exactly what's needed!

Windows 10 x64... 22H2 19045.2728

Martin

Thank you

I see that you have two computers: A laptop and a desktop. In witch is the problem occurring?

Oops, neither, I need to add the third PC to my list.

Haven't tried SFC for a long time - will give it a go. Not sure about a repair install. If things can go wrong, they always will when it comes to me and computers! I'm worried about ending up with an unbootable PC as a result! Actually, I just reecall that this is a dual boot PC (two instances of Windows 10, for reasons I won't go into now: I only ever use one of them. I will see what happens when I boot into the other instance of Windows 10; maybe the files will copy better from there. (Will report on that).

Does the copying go wrong while the display is still on or after it has gone off

Still on - the copy window is open but either never starts or stops after a short while. I have tried with copy programmes like TeraCopy (which I use on all my machines by default) - with the same result. Small files often manage to copy Ok before things stop, but a file of say 100MBs can be hard to transfer on this machine.

DiskCheck: I have already done this many times over the years (probably) I have put up with this issue with the various HDD drives I use, and no faults are found. Or if there is a fault on the odd occasion, it is repaired in Windows, but there's never any change in copy behaviour as a result.

Thanks!

Today I have tried copying to the same HDD I was using the other day and which just refused to work, freezing up Explorer to boot (so to speak). Now of course, files copy across just fine (and very fast: a folder of ten 50MB files copied over in three seconds), in both instances of XP10 on the PC - so it's very difficult to test and draw any conclusions. I will try again in a day or two...