USB3 Drive Base Disconnecting During Write Cycle

Update : upgraded my desktop to Windows 10 and the drive works fine on my desktop.

Even tried a factory reset of the Surface to no avail...

You're lucky you were able to return it. I was just told that since there is no fix right now I'll have to wait to see if a firmware update solves it (Microsoft Store Employee)

Has anyone tried a different OS to see if that has an issue?

I did a bunch of testing with my Book (I7, 16GB, 512GB) before returning it and am convinced it is not USB power related. Also, I had files get corrupted when writing them to the external drives individually or as part of a large transfer, whether connected directly or via a dock.

I would NOT use this for any data you care about. I returned my Book and will wait until I know that MS has addressed this. There have been multiple reports of the same issue.

Here are the tests or incidences I have experienced:

Corrupted Word file when saving to external storage.

Corrupted pictures when transferring from internal storage to external storage.

Disconnected external storage during large file transfers. (I also had intermittent disconnects with smaller file transfers and believe it is not related to the total size of a transfer, just that a large transfer is more likely to fail)

This was with external SSD and external My Passport connected directly to Book or via external Targus Dock (powered). They both work perfectly, all of the time when connected to a Lenova Yoga 2 Pro via USB3 directly or via the Targus Dock.

If you have seen me post this before, I apologize, but I believe it is important for buyers to be aware that there appears to be a problem on at least some of the Books when using external drives. Too much to lose!

That said, there are others that have our configuration that have tested this and have not seen this problem. Mine was from the same lot as yours.

Also adding myself to this list.

Surface Book Lot #1547

Core i7/ 512GB SSD / 16GB RAM

I've had the Surface Book since December 17th now and during that time, I've  bought a second Western Digital 2TB USB 3.0 Passport drive.  Definitely something up with the USB port's power or driver as connecting these two onto my home PC and transferring the files doesn't happen.

I ended up having to transfer all my files in small chunks instead of moving my entire files from my old passport to the new passport.  This is extremely annoying from the perspective of someone who is a photographer and is wanting to use surface book as a mobile hub for photo/video editing.  

Reading though this thread it sounds like even the $200 Microsoft Dock or anything powered attached to it won't help.

--The TL;DR version--

With every new Laptop/PC I buy or build, I always do an initial full Acronis image of the drive. The image ended up being extremely large (400GB+). I did this to completion twice and a 3rd time half way trying to figure out why they're so large in comparison to all my other images before realizing that bitlocker was on by default.  This was with just the older Passport drive connected so I can at least say that just having one drive connected, everything appears to be fine.

The next thing I did was to start moving important videos and phtos from my older Passport to the new one I just bought and then just use the old Passport as a drive to hold Steam games.  I use a software called Beyond Compare 4 to backup/sync large amount of files from one drive to another so in this case it's just copying all the files over to the new drive. After some time, not sure how long but that is when I started seeing the Event ID 11, 50, 51, and 140 errors show up on the Event Viewer.

11 - ERROR: driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk#\DR#

50 - Warning: {Write Delayed Failed:} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file.

51 - Warning: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk#\DR#

140 - Warning: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in volumeID: #:

As noted in the beginning, if I move files in small chunks, maybe 15GB max(?) things appear to be manageable.

Hi,

Looks like my Surface Book is having issues with writing to my UASP(USB Attached SCSI) External disk enclosure.  I run a ICYRaid MB662U3-2S R1 enclosure with 2 disks in Raid 1.   When I try to write on the disk, it will sort of start but then will hang forever.

The Task manager show the drive has having 100% wait time

In the event log, I get the following :

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

The IO operation at logical block address 0x5a9448 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\0000011f) was retried.

The IO operation at logical block address 0x698c00 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\0000011f) was retried.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

The IO operation at logical block address 0x5a9448 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\0000011f) was retried.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort4, was issued.

The external drive enclosure works A1 on my other laptop, running in UASP mode under Windows 8.1.  Also works A1 on my Desktop, also running Windows 8.1.  I'm now upgrading my desktop to Windows 10 to see if I could replicate the issue.

I'm pretty sure UASP is the cause because it will hang on all the ports (including those on the dock) but adding a USB 2 hub to my surface and connecting the drive though it (disabling UASP) fixes the problem (but I get terrible performance)