Copying large folder hangs My Book, leads to BSOD on Windows 7

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

I have two 4 GB My Book external hard drives. I have mixed success in copying large folders (100 to 500 GB) from an internal drive to either My Book drive. The copy usually hangs (no progress, and the time to complete starts getting bigger). After an extended period of time after the hangup, I get a Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), with the error “driver power state failure error”. Before the BSOD, other programs may hang and cannot be terminated. Logging out or restarting Windows 7 will also hang, requiring a hardware reset.

I have copied these large folders to other brands of external hard drives without any problems.

I checked and verified that I have the latest firmware on the My Book drive. The driver being used by Windows 7 is Microsoft USB Mass Storage Device version 6.1.7601.19144 (6/21/2006). I have used Windows Update to look for newer drivers, but I cannot find anything.

As far as I can tell, this is a My Book problem. It feels like some sort of disk I/O error. I would appreciate any suggestions!

2

Hi AlanD2,

I would suggest to run SMART Status Test using WD Drive Utility to check for the health of drive.
https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10408

3

I did as you suggested, asp73. Both drives passed all tests with flying colors.

I did notice in the Settings tab of the WD Drive Utilities window that the drives’ Sleep Timer was turned on and set to 30 minutes. I’m now wondering if the drives are going into sleep mode despite the ongoing activity from the folder copy operation. If Windows couldn’t get the drives to wake up again, this could explain the BSOD error “driver power state failure error”.

I’m going to turn the Sleep Timer off and see if this changes anything.