Saving file to external USB requires hard reboot & corrupts every time

Hi Seven Forums :)

Have a strange recurring issue and hopefully you guys can help me home in on the problem! Not 100% sure it's software over hardware though.

Situation is - saving a file in Visual Studio 2013 to my external hard drive (usb, exFAT, hardware encrypted) always causes an AppHang. The program stops responding, and any other program which tries to access that location on the drive does the same. These processes refuse to be killed and the only way out is to hard shut down the computer (regular shut down just sits there..). After doing so, chkdsk reveals that the location on the drive has corruption issues, which it then fixes and all is fine. Until the next time I try to save a file that is.

Some more information:

• Only started happening about a month ago, before that the files saved fine.
• Doesn't happen if I use the drive on another computer running similar Visual Studio
• Other programs can save the same files fine. The problem did once occur with P4V, but I can't say with 100% certainty that it wasn't due to forgetting to fix with chkdsk following one of the reboots.
• Tried saving files to other USB hard drives (FAT32 and NTFS, yet to try another exFAT) works fine.
• My initial thought was PSU not being quite up to powering the drive, as I was already concerned that the wattage wasn't high enough for the machine. Beefier one made no difference though.
• Some googling suggested system file corruption, ran System File Checker and there were indeed some corrupted files, but have now resolved these and the problem persists.
• Ran Visual Studio with no plugins, and reinstalled it, issue persists.
• Ran windows in diagnostic startup (services etc. disabled) and the problem is still there.

Since I can currently reproduce the problem 100% of the time, I hope there is some sort of diagnostics I can do to identify what the cause of this is, but this isn't really my wheelhouse and googling this particular issue has proven mostly fruitless.


Hopefully you can help!

If it helps anyone who gets here via google:

It turned out the issue was strongly linked to the drive being exFAT. A USB stick I formatted to exFAT also had the same issues. My conclusion was that it was likely a bug in the latest Visual Studio. Have reformatted my drives to NTFS and all is well.

Thanks for sharing, may help the next person :)