Windows Stops Copying

spapakons said:

My parents had a similar experience. An expensive known brand microwave that died soon and a cheap "no-name" (nickname for unknown brands) that they still use after many years. We also prefer cheap vacuum cleaners, toasters and the like. It's not worth investing on an expensive brand for such devices. Also WD have a good reputation, but their 2.5" external disks have their SATA to USB controller soldered on the board! This means if the controller dies, you CANNOT remove it and use a third-party USB enclosure! Other brands, as far as I know, just use a standard 2.5" SATA disk in a USB enclosure, so you won't lose your data if the controller dies. Just break it open and put the disk in a third-party 2.5" USB enclosure or a SATA-to-USB adapter. Having said that, I recently bought another WD USB hard disk because it was the cheaper in the shop... Shame to me

Click to expand...

It's too bad WD bought out HGST. Don't know where I'm going to get cheap Helium filled spinners anymore. I refuse to buy WD spinners ever again. WD treated me poorly and their SMR drives are garbage. Come to think of it ALL SMR drives are garbage IMO. Aaah well, the transition to 4TB SSDs is slowly underway, I suppose, here on the Scannerman home front. It was inevitable.

I have a pair of 8TB Seagate HDD's in my NAS box, but my computers are all SSD equipped now, and all four have at least one NVMe M.2 drive. I can't believe I held out so long upgrading to a motherboard that supported the M.2 drives, I was certainly shortchanging myself in performance!

In order to upgrade to M.2 or NVMe I have to remove my combo SATA III and USB 3.0 PCIe card. Unless I find a combo NVMe and USB 3.0 I will have to sacrifice USB 3.0 ports and use my onboard USB 2.0 ports. This is not a sacrifice I am willing to do any soon. Besides it won't work at full speed since my PCIe slot is version 3.0 Also the SATA III ports on the PCIe card don't work at full speed either but are noticeable faster than the onboad SATA II ones. At this moment my PC is as fast as it gets. No hurry to go to the next level.

Maybe time for a new motherboard.

gunrunnerjohn said:

Maybe time for a new motherboard.

Click to expand...

It's not that simple. I will have to change the whole computer. New motherboard, new CPU, new RAM, new TV tuner card.. Probably in a few more years when it won't be able to run Windows 12+. As long as I can still install latest Windows version and meets my needs, I will postpone it.

gunrunnerjohn said:

Actually, I've returned dozens of items over that last several years to Amazon, never any questions. You just have to make sure they're not sold through their 3rd party stores but direct from Amazon.

Click to expand...

Just about every reputable place has a good return policy and not just amazon. And if there's ever any problem then I call up the cc company and dispute the charge.

That hasn't happened in years, though...

Scannerman said:

It's too bad WD bought out HGST. Don't know where I'm going to get cheap Helium filled spinners anymore. I refuse to buy WD spinners ever again. WD treated me poorly and their SMR drives are garbage. Come to think of it ALL SMR drives are garbage IMO. Aaah well, the transition to 4TB SSDs is slowly underway, I suppose, here on the Scannerman home front. It was inevitable.

Click to expand...

So HGST external drives now has soldered controllers now too?

~

You can still buy a bare metal WD HDD spinners and put your own enclosure around it, though...

In fact I started a thread about that here, not too long ago along similar lines.

Looking for good external enclosures for the following SSDs

gunrunnerjohn said:

I have a pair of 8TB Seagate HDD's in my NAS box, but my computers are all SSD equipped now, and all four have at least one NVMe M.2 drive. I can't believe I held out so long upgrading to a motherboard that supported the M.2 drives, I was certainly shortchanging myself in performance!

Click to expand...

The only reason I delayed that was because I still had a good laptop that I wasn't ready to retire yet. in the meantime, the transition was to buy a SATA connected SSD which I also referenced in that thread up above.

Yes, for all of us with old computers before M.2 and NVMe technology, the most reasonable upgrade is to replace the mechanical SATA disk with a SATA SSD. This is for the Windows drive which makes the old computer a lot faster. There is little benefit in performance replacing a secondary disk with SSD. For me it makes more sense to replace a secondary disk with a larger mechanical disk.

cheaterslick said:

Just about every reputable place has a good return policy and not just amazon. And if there's ever any problem then I call up the cc company and dispute the charge.

That hasn't happened in years, though...



So HGST external drives now has soldered controllers now too?

~

You can still buy a bare metal WD HDD spinners and put your own enclosure around it, though...

In fact I started a thread about that here, not too long ago along similar lines.

Looking for good external enclosures for the following SSDs



The only reason I delayed that was because I still had a good laptop that I wasn't ready to retire yet. in the meantime, the transition was to buy a SATA connected SSD which I also referenced in that thread up above.

Click to expand...

Bottom's up!

Technically I am retired. Depending on your placement on the time line I'm pseudo-Luddite to moderate. At the turn of the millennium I was still using floppies. I'll still buy mechanical drives when required because a 10 TB Helium filled drive put in RAID 1 with it's double is likely to last longer than a stick of NVMe. Even if the spinner dies I'll still have a mirrored copy on hand so virtually zero data is lost. Yup. That's old school these days. I know.

There are all sorts of enclosures for SSDs these days. You can use a SATA SSD in practically any standard SATE enclosure. You can also use converters for NVMe in a SATA enclosure although I dare say it will run slower. Then again, with USB you're limited to those slower speeds anyway. NVMe running on USB strikes me as a bit of a waste but to each their own. I'm of the persuasion that NVMe was made to run on PCIe.

I still purchase silicon from WD occasionally. I refuse to buy any spinners from WD because their company treated me poorly and very unprofessionally. Part of me feels I shouldn't be giving WD a dime anymore. I shouldn't have to haggle for anything from them when their hardware fails while it is still under warranty. They should replace it no questions asked and pay the shipping as well. It's not like they're hurting for money. The other part of me is the logical part that says if they sell a good product and stand behind that product such as their Western Digital Black NVMe then a broad brushstroke judgement isn't rational and good company policy is worthy of reward. Coupled with the knowledge that it was Western Digital that inadvertently put me on the path to doing my homework and researching SMR drives I have them to thank for this. So I'll still buy silicon from WD as a concession. Yup, I'm weird that way.

There was a time WD made good quality mechanical hard drives. I have an array of WD Velociraptor drives in RAID 10 that are 14 years old. They just don't die. They're amazing. WD doesn't make them anymore but I have two backups sitting on the shelf for just in case a drive fails. The WD Black drives of yore are hardly what they're passing off as "Black" today. No, they are garbage. You may as well cross your fingers and go Blue. Better yet, don't buy mechanical drives from Western Digital. That's my advice. You can take it or leave it.

It would not surprise me in the least if WD started giving the formerly HGST line of drives soldered controllers but I can't verify that. I simply refuse to buy them now because I know WD owns them now. So far, the Toshiba line of NAS drives seems to be working out okay for me but these are small drives, only 4TB in size. Howbeit they are CMR drives so they can handle a lot of reading and writing before they start to lose integrity. I have two N300's that have not given me any issue so far and one X300 that is more costly and reportedly even better quality. All these drives can be put in enclosures. They're not exactly cheap but they do the job. I expect that they will out last most silicon of the same capacity.

At my age I'm looking at putting together systems that will run years after I'm already dead and gone. I've been running bare metal for the past 22 years so that's part of my reason for running RAID.

spapakons said:

It's not that simple. I will have to change the whole computer. New motherboard, new CPU, new RAM, new TV tuner card..

Click to expand...

That's the route I took. My ten your old computer was getting long in the tooth, so I figured it was time to treat myself to a new system.

gunrunnerjohn said:

That's the route I took. My ten your old computer was getting long in the tooth, so I figured it was time to treat myself to a new system.

Click to expand...

Not only I must afford it, probably with many installments with my credit card, but I would have to do it without my wife realising and complaining about I have the wrong priorities. The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is close to zero when it comes to electronics, as many married men know.

spapakons said:

Not only I must afford it, probably with many installments with my credit card, but I would have to do it without my wife realising and complaining about I have the wrong priorities. The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is close to zero when it comes to electronics, as many married men know.

Click to expand...

It helps if she uses a PC. Then you can always tell her you're building her a better PC as you upgrade your old one. The system works even better with children. The older PC goes bumpty-bump all the way down line. Everyone benefits and the Mrs. gets the most stable PC of all because by that time you know it inside out so you know how to make it run best. Meanwhile you're learning the newer hardware for yourself on your own PC.

Probably I will use the child trick when my son goes to Elementary School and needs a computer (teacher asks them to find information online about some subject and print it). Now he is only five years old and goes to Kindergarten. I can wait a 1-2 more years. In the mean time I only buy a component at a time and install it when I am alone at home or when she puts our son to sleep. My last upgrade was to replace my USB 3.0 PCIe card with a combo USB 3.0 and SATA III PCIe card and my nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with an RTX 3050.

spapakons said:

Not only I must afford it, probably with many installments with my credit card, but I would have to do it without my wife realising and complaining about I have the wrong priorities. The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is close to zero when it comes to electronics, as many married men know.

Click to expand...

I guess I live in Utopia, as long as I keep her computers working, I'm pretty free to do as I like with mine.

spapakons said:

The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is close to zero when it comes to electronics, as many married men know.

Click to expand...

I have used the ol' if we buy a new laptop we can give the old one to someone in the family that needs a better laptop than what they have. I follow it up by explaining how it's a win, win for everyone involved. I've used the Hey hon, my desktop died and I need a new one two times that I can remember. Once was legit because the desktop did die on me. Or at least I thought it did. It wasn't until a few years latter that @Scannerman convinced me to put back the parts I had stripped out and try resetting the BIOS. The other time I felt it was getting around time to upgrade my desktop but I had to find a good excuse to convince my wife to give me the OK. As luck would have it, the CPU fan died and the computer wouldn't boot past the warning message. I waited a few months after buying the new computer before I replaced the fan. Now I have two destop computers running. The new one is on a stand on the left of my office desk and old one is on the left side on the floor. Each one is used for different purposes.

Winuser said:

Now I have two destop computers running. The new one is on a stand on the left of my office desk and old one is on the left side on the floor. Each one is used for different purposes.

Click to expand...

I have always had two desktop computers, I keep a secondary in case a fatal flaw hits my primary machine. I usually just migrate the existing "prime" machine to the secondary position and pickup a new one for the primary machine. This time it was a complete turnover, I upgraded both of them. However, I always manage to keep the boss running with a newer machine. Since her needs are pretty simple, browsing, word processing, etc., I typically buy a pre-packaged machine like a Dell and add anything necessary like a secondary backup drive, new monitor, etc.

My old primary machine was over ten years old and was pretty long in the tooth. My PCB software and 3D modeling stuff was getting a bit painful to work with on the old machine, bigger 3D models would take seconds to rotate. It's been very nice to have a 5x faster machine with a much better GPU, I should have done this years ago! Moving up from SATA HDD & a boot SSD to all internal NVMe M.2 drives was a huge boost, a 10x improvement in raw transfer speeds!

When I was living with my parents, every time I upgrade my computer I put my old parts in my dad's and upgraded his. It was a win-win situation.

spapakons said:

Probably I will use the child trick when my son goes to Elementary School and needs a computer (teacher asks them to find information online about some subject and print it). Now he is only five years old and goes to Kindergarten. I can wait a 1-2 more years. In the mean time I only buy a component at a time and install it when I am alone at home or when she puts our son to sleep. My last upgrade was to replace my USB 3.0 PCIe card with a combo USB 3.0 and SATA III PCIe card and my nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with an RTX 3050.

Click to expand...

My wife over here likes your term, WAF. She hasn't had any major issues with her Sabertooth in years. Now that the elder daughter is gone to university I've pretty much capped out on my rotation factor. That pretty much suits me fine as I likely won't be in the market for anything new and bleeding edge simply because I likely won't live that long. Already I have precious little use for Co-Pilot and the need for speed just isn't that badly needed for my purposes to justify DDR5-6. I would venture to say that your SATA III card and your GFX card are ready for a new home. The sooner you get your child on a PC the sooner it will be proficient at computers and related devices. My girls started in diapers. This might partly explain why the elder is gunning for software engineering.

gunrunnerjohn said:

I guess I live in Utopia, as long as I keep her computers working, I'm pretty free to do as I like with mine.

Click to expand...

As I stated, it helps when the Mrs. uses a PC too. When you make it about her it's amazing how quickly the resistance dissipates. I told the Mrs. that I needed "new" to figure out this stuff before I handed it over to her. I don't get any more concerned looks and I don't get lectures on PC parts.

gunrunnerjohn said:

I have always had two desktop computers, I keep a secondary in case a fatal flaw hits my primary machine. I usually just migrate the existing "prime" machine to the secondary position and pickup a new one for the primary machine. This time it was a complete turnover, I upgraded both of them. However, I always manage to keep the boss running with a newer machine. Since her needs are pretty simple, browsing, word processing, etc., I typically buy a pre-packaged machine like a Dell and add anything necessary like a secondary backup drive, new monitor, etc.

My old primary machine was over ten years old and was pretty long in the tooth. My PCB software and 3D modeling stuff was getting a bit painful to work with on the old machine, bigger 3D models would take seconds to rotate. It's been very nice to have a 5x faster machine with a much better GPU, I should have done this years ago! Moving up from SATA HDD & a boot SSD to all internal NVMe M.2 drives was a huge boost, a 10x improvement in raw transfer speeds!

Click to expand...

A decade is a pretty solid time for flipping the PC. If you know what you're doing you'll likely get another 10 out of it simply by flipping it to a family member. Networking helps. All the PCs can then draw from a pool. Usually this is a NAS. Even an older PC can be used for network attached storage. Anyway, that's how I roll.

Winuser said:

I have used the ol' if we buy a new laptop we can give the old one to someone in the family that needs a better laptop than what they have. I follow it up by explaining how it's a win, win for everyone involved. I've used the Hey hon, my desktop died and I need a new one two times that I can remember. Once was legit because the desktop did die on me. Or at least I thought it did. It wasn't until a few years latter that @Scannerman convinced me to put back the parts I had stripped out and try resetting the BIOS. The other time I felt it was getting around time to upgrade my desktop but I had to find a good excuse to convince my wife to give me the OK. As luck would have it, the CPU fan died and the computer wouldn't boot past the warning message. I waited a few months after buying the new computer before I replaced the fan. Now I have two destop computers running. The new one is on a stand on the left of my office desk and old one is on the left side on the floor. Each one is used for different purposes.

Click to expand...

Okay, I confess I was accessory to the crime! At least this way you can have a PC that can use Linux exclusively if you like. Another ethical justification is that you want to help keep PCs out of the landfill. I used to use this line a lot to explain my garage sale purchases which I would fix up and give to kids in the neighborhood who didn't have their own computer. It's amazing how easily I would get parental consent for this in a written note. The mystery was quickly solved when one child came over to the house to Lan party with the youngest and I asked how their PC was working out for them. The reply? "Oh, it works good but my Dad is always using it now." lol Meh, it's still one spared from the recycling station. Anyway, as far as the WAF is concerned I still have an ace card up my sleeve: The Mrs. is addicted to yarn.

Scannerman said:

A decade is a pretty solid time for flipping the PC. If you know what you're doing you'll likely get another 10 out of it simply by flipping it to a family member. Networking helps. All the PCs can then draw from a pool. Usually this is a NAS. Even an older PC can be used for network attached storage. Anyway, that's how I roll.

Click to expand...

I have a NAS with a pair of 8TB mirrored drives, and it backs up to a NTFS formatted USB attached to the NAS for another level. The NTFS format allows me to grab that drive and read it on any machine. Since the NAS has no problem with NTFS, why not?

I don't know if I'll get ten years out of these two machines, or even ten years out of me, we'll just have to wait and see.

Scannerman said:

Okay, I confess I was accessory to the crime!

Click to expand...

No! You were a savior of a desktop computer that almost went to that big computer heaven in the sky. My old desktop and I thank you. I'm the one that is guilty of a crime. I used a inexpensive CPU cooler fan as an excuse to buy a new computer. On a good note, I use my new desktop and the old desktop with the non-working CPU fan almost every day.

Edit: I'm actually using the old desktop to encode some video content for my streaming computer while using my new desktop to surf the web. I was going to balance my checkbook on my new desktop today but decided that putting it off until tomorrow wouldn't be a problem.

Explorer.exe crashing, often is a warning sign of a bad USB drive connection. You will need to pull it out of the USB port and reinsert it.

Same with USB drive being unusually slow.