Question External Drives stop working after a while. WITCHCRAFT!

GardenPT

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Sep 13, 2016
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I've had this laptop for around 5 years and never had this issue. This started to happen a few months ago, couldn't tell you exactly when.
Any USB storage device that I plug into the laptop works fine initially. After some time, whether it's being used or not, it just disappears from "This PC". Reconnecting the drive in question, or any other, in any USB port, does nothing, so I have to restart the PC to get the drives to work again. My USB mouse and gamepad/controller always work regardless.

I have tried to figure out what makes it "disconnect", but so far I've only realized that it's when I click on the explorer window in which the drive had been open in the background for a while, or when I try to open the drive from "This PC" after it hasn't been used for a while. The current issue is that I'm transferring a large amount of files (around 50 GB) to an external hard drive and the drive just "disconnects" mid-transfer.

I've searched online for everything. I uninstalled the USB Root Hubs, unticked the box under Power Management that says "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power", disabled the USB selective suspend setting in the Power Options, tried previous versions of Windows 10, checked for driver updates in Windows Update... Nothing seems to work.

In my search for a solution to this, I see the odd comment sometimes stating that this is an OS issue that was introduced recently with some update. I'm not comfortable rolling back to previous versions of Windows 10 because some programs stop working and issues arise, so I'd like to try out other stuff first.

Please help.
 
With all things said and done, what is the make and model of your laptop? Have you made sure you're on the latest BIOS update for your laptop? Which version of Windows 10 are you on? For drivers, you're advised to install any and/or all drivers manually in an elevated command, after downloading them from manufacturer's support site.

Elevated command = Right click installer>Run as Administrator.