One of my drives disappears from time to time thanks to Intel Rapid Storage. It happens if I haven't used the drive for a while. It reappears after one or two reboots and remains as long as I read or write to it at least once every day or two.

In reply to a post by Taras:

try a chkdsk on the usb drive.

is it a spinner or chips ?

Have a batch file with chkdsk /f on all drives before I run a backup. Its a brand new Toshiba N300 spinner 4tb. What I dont understand is why is Windows trying to page to the USB with 32GB ram while writing a big 900GB file. In the end I used robocopy to copy the file and verify with hashtools.

It will copy 2 x 900GB files to similar Tosh drives using teracopy but on the third file will fail with code 1 cant write to destination. But if its paging to the drive then I am not surprised.

Edited by Banger (Sun 17-May-26 12:13:31)

In reply to a post by Banger:

What I dont understand is why is Windows trying to page to the USB with 32GB ram while writing a big 900GB file.

If Windows doesn't think the drive is removable, it might put a pagefile.sys on the drive. You can control that in:

* Settings-> System -> About -> Advanced System Settings.

This gives the old Windows system dialog, and you can select the advanced tab, in the performace group (top) click Settings button. Advanced tab, and you can choose the Virtual Memory settings. By default it is set to automatic.

Windows pagefile isn't these days what it was in XP.

Done that. It's not hardware as it doesn't happen in Linux. But Macrium Reflect and Hasleo Backup are Windows only.

Edited by Banger (Sun 17-May-26 16:40:45)

Do you have any third party security software on your Windows?

No Defender.

Done it again this week after May update. Teracopy hashes dont match and one disk partition table has been wiped!

In reply to a post by Banger:

Done it again this week after May update. Teracopy hashes dont match and one disk partition table has been wiped!

Partition table being wiped is rather serious. I'm actually wondering if your motherboard's USB ports might have problems. If you have a motherboard updating tool see if there are any updated drivers for the chipset.

My ASUS board, (Intel 12th Gen i7 CPU) has driver updates occasionally, and its an Intel chipset with two USB 2.0 ports, and three USB 3.0 ports with A connector (max 5 gigabit) and one USB-C 3.1 port (max 10 gigabit).

In the Pentium 3 and AMD Athlon days there were all sorts of issues with USB on these boards when Win98SE and WinME were common. I remember replacing a motherboard using a VIA chipset as I could not get any USB storage or USB web cam to work.

Nothing for the chipset still at 2021 on Control Centre for Gigabyte. I now dont trust Windows so am copying files back from another drive in Linux. Unfortunately I have just discovered there is a backup partition table on GPT disks which it is and can be restored with Gparted. Wish I had known this before I had started writing files to the disk and overwriting old content.

Edited by Banger (Sun 24-May-26 17:48:54)

Gigabyte are really bad at driver updates.. Assuming its a cpu linked usb hub, go to either intel or amd's driver pages and grab the latest drivers and see if that helps.

Also another tip, say if the driver needed is realtek driver, go to the latest mobo that has that same chip so that you get the latest driver.

That works quite will with the realtek 1220 sound chips