Windows 10 Freezes on MKV transfer

[mdlupke]

I've done a clean install of Windows 10 on a build with an Asus X99 Pro USB 3.1 Motherboard, I7 5930K chip, EVGA GEFORCE GTX 980 graphics card, 32 gigs of ram, Samsung 850 pro SSD and 4 4TB hard drives. Its a big box. As a favor, I provide secondary backup to a professional photographer, and so transfer large compact flash cards to the computer, and then onto Drobo raid drives with no problems; in fact USB 3 has proven a terrific improvement with file transfer times.
Except with .mkv files.
When I was on Windows 7, I used one of the hard drives as a media server with Plex, and I would frequently load movies and TV Shows on the drive, and after viewing archive them to an external drive using a StarTech USB dock.
Since upgrading to Windows 10, all other file transfers work great, but the .MKV file transfers result in the screen, mouse, keyboard and drives freezing after about a minute of transfer time.
Checking the Event Viewer shows no unusual activity at the time of the freeze.
I have done multitudes of troubleshooting.
Removed the AVG antivirus software (now using Windows Defender).
Removed Asus AI Suite
Turned off Thumbnails
Emptied Thumbnail Cache
Made a transfer folder to hold the mkv files and then moved the folder - still locked.
Created an exception for MKV files in Windows Defender (not always the best idea)

When monitoring the Task Manager while attempting an MKV file transfer, I did notice that just prior to the freeze, the Hard Drive, which had been transferring at 161 MB/s leaped up to 283 MB/s just prior to crashing.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Mark L.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Maybe try turning off RAPID on the SSD?

Also, and this is a long shot, you might manually install the Matroska codec.

http://www.matroska.org/technical/guides/playback/windows/index.html

 

[mdlupke]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.
Additional information - using a Corsair RM1000 Power Supply, so more than adequate there.
As part of the troubleshooting process, also did a Windows Memory Diagnostic check, and passed.
I then followed up by turning off the Windows Media Player. System seems more stable immediately.
Searching other forums also suggested a K-Lite Codec Pack - any experience there?
Thanks,
Mark L.

 

[mdlupke]

And using VLC player for default audio and video playback.

 

[Darkbreeze]

The K-lite codec pack used to be a good choice, now it's filled with crapware. I don't recommend using it. The VLC media player includes all the codecs you should ever need for the most part. The codecs really shouldn't have anything to do with TRANSFERRING files, just playing them, but it was a long shot.

 

[mdlupke]

RAPID mode on the Samsung SSD was already disabled (apparently it couldn't verify my Windows 10 license, although Windows 10 has me verified).

The disabling of the Windows Media Player seems to have corrected the Freeze issue (no BSOD, but as mentioned the hang would require a hard reset). Perhaps WMP was monitoring all video files, and this was causing the conflict.

Much less bothersome new issue has cropped up - file transfers of MKV files now buzz along at 150 MB/s, but every 10 or 20 gigabytes along, the transfer will drop to zero for about 10 seconds and then speed back up. I assume that some buffer is being flushed. Any ideas on how to address this issue? Or is it a new question?
Thanks,

Mark L.

 

[mdlupke]

For clarity, the Samsung SSD is used for the OS and Program Files, all the data are stored on the other hard drives.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Go into control panel, device manager, drives, and double click each of your drives, one at a time, and on the policies tab make sure "enable write caching on the device" is enabled. Likely it's related to flushing, but unless you've got drives powered separately from the rest of the system you don't want to turn off buffer flushing. Otherwise it's normal-ish.

Also, try to make sure that when possible you connect your storage drives to the primary SATA headers rather than any secondary controllers if more than one controller is used on your motherboard. Secondary headers are usually either slower or in some cases prone to issues.