Suddenly cannot write to my drive

[DezGalbie]

I have a home media server which houses a bunch of 3TB HDDs.

I've noticed a weird issue with one of the drives which has suddenly appeared. The drive is still less than half full of data but whenever I try to write anything to it things go wrong. Usually what happens is the little graph display which charts the transfer speed in Windows 10 pops up and everything looks normal for a couple of seconds. But then the transfer speed drops to zero and it locks up. I am forced to actually restart the system in order to start another transfer of data. The initial transfer can't be cancelled without the restart.

I have installed CrystalDiskInfo but it tells me that the drive is healthy. The built-in Windows tool to check for drive issues reports no problems either.

Does anyone know how to solve this issue?

Or is the drive just dying in some way which both Windows and CrystalDiskInfo can't detect?

[Duckster]

7 minutes ago, DezGalbie said:

I have a home media server which houses a bunch of 3TB HDDs.

I've noticed a weird issue with one of the drives which has suddenly appeared. The drive is still less than half full of data but whenever I try to write anything to it things go wrong. Usually what happens is the little graph display which charts the transfer speed in Windows 10 pops up and everything looks normal for a couple of seconds. But then the transfer speed drops to zero and it locks up. I am forced to actually restart the system in order to start another transfer of data. The initial transfer can't be cancelled without the restart.

I have installed CrystalDiskInfo but it tells me that the drive is healthy. The built-in Windows tool to check for drive issues reports no problems either.

Does anyone know how to solve this issue?

Or is the drive just dying in some way which both Windows and CrystalDiskInfo can't detect?

I don't know if this is entirely related, but have you had a power outage recently? 

[SenKa]

I have had this issue before with a few drives. I believe it's a bug with the files you are transferring or something to do with them.

[DezGalbie]

2 minutes ago, Duckster said:

I don't know if this is entirely related, but have you had a power outage recently? 

I'm fairly certain that there hasn't been. I would have noticed that the server was off when I hadn't actually turned it off. I don't have a UPS or anything like that so if there was a power outage then I would have to physically start up the server again with the power button.

[Duckster]

Just now, DezGalbie said:

I'm fairly certain that there hasn't been. I would have noticed that the server was off when I hadn't actually turned it off. I don't have a UPS or anything like that so if there was a power outage then I would have to physically start up the server again with the power button.

oh ok, because I have heard of ssds and maybe even hdds not working becuase of an unexpected outage of power.

[DezGalbie]

4 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

I have had this issue before with a few drives. I believe it's a bug with the files you are transferring or something to do with them.

Any idea of the nature of the bug?

I could try it out with different files if I know what to test. So far I've only tried a couple of different files multiple times each

[DezGalbie]

Just now, Duckster said:

oh ok, because I have heard of ssds and maybe even hdds not working becuase of an unexpected outage of power.

I see, yeah, that would be something to watch out for then!

And maybe a UPS should be on the shopping list for when a power outage does hit...

[SenKa]

3 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

Any idea of the nature of the bug?

I could try it out with different files if I know what to test. So far I've only tried a couple of different files multiple times each

I only had that issue with very large batches of the files (several TB's.)

 

I honestly couldn't tell you what exactly, I wish I could. I will say, it has gone away since I updated to 1809.

[DezGalbie]

3 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

I only had that issue with very large batches of the files (several TB's.)

 

I honestly couldn't tell you what exactly, I wish I could. I will say, it has gone away since I updated to 1809.

I see. Well if you suddenly get any moments of inspiration about what was causing it then please get back to me. Cheers.

[SenKa]

3 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

I see. Well if you suddenly get any moments of inspiration about what was causing it then please get back to me. Cheers.

I will run some tests on my 8TB drive, it was the biggest offender between my OS drive, 1TB SSD, and that.

 

I believe it may be a windows bug, but I have ~6TB of files to test with.

 

Will come back with results. But, for sure get a UPS.

[SenKa]

3 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

I see. Well if you suddenly get any moments of inspiration about what was causing it then please get back to me. Cheers.

Quick testing of the scenarios of which it failed prior, and could not. No amount of large, small, or compressed files could tank the drive to 0 Mb/s.

 

I believe it was a Windows bug, as I was on 1803 the last time I had the issue.

[DezGalbie]

Just now, SenpaiKaplan said:

Quick testing of the scenarios of which it failed prior, and could not. No amount of large, small, or compressed files could tank the drive to 0 Mb/s.

 

I believe it was a Windows bug, as I was on 1803 the last time I had the issue.

Cool. Well that sounds promising. I'm downloading the Windows update now. Hopefully that will fix things...

[SenKa]

3 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

Cool. Well that sounds promising. I'm downloading the Windows update now. Hopefully that will fix things...

Good luck man, if you ever have other issues feel free to mention me

[DezGalbie]

2 hours ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Good luck man, if you ever have other issues feel free to mention me

Finished the update process and sadly I still have the same issue  Tried transferring a new file across. It seems to work fine until it gets to about 9% then the transfer speed drops to zero and the system starts freezing up. Programs already open won't respond or close, and I can't open anything else. Can't even cancel the transfer without resetting the system entirely.

The system has 10 drives attached but it is only happening with this one. Yet when I check the drive I'm being told it's healthy with no issues/errors.

Back to the drawing board.

If anyone else has any ideas then feel free to share too.

[DezGalbie]

A little update for anyone who happens to come across this post and is looking for answers.

I finally got to the bottom of the issue. There was an issue with the drive. I used a program called Victoria to scan the drive and found errors on 6 blocks. I remapped the drive with the program and it is now working perfectly again.

It's a bit annoying that CrystalDisk and Windows could not pick up these issues with the drive, but I've at least found a useful new program for my arsenal. It takes a few hours to scan a 3TB drive, but it worked a treat.