I'm running Windows 8.1 Pro (64 bit) on a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H (rev 1.0) motherboard with a Samsung 830 SSD and 8GB of RAM. All is normally well in general day to day use.
However, when I plug in a USB3 hard drive (Both a Samsung USB3 hard drive and a Hard drive dock with Sata hard drive plugged into it) to the back ports and initiate a transfer from my server over the network to the hard drive, after a minute or so into the copy process, the speed indicator graph plunges to the bottom (zero) and the system freezes and becomes unresponsive within about 5 seconds. i.e. the mouse will move and still click for a couple of seconds but then the whole system freezes.
Transfers over the network to an attached USB3 hard drive are always and consistently reproducing the same system freezing. I've also had the system freeze when writing to the USB3 hard drive when recovering an Acronis backup which was not over the network but was stored on an internal hard drive - so I think this is a system/usb issue not necessarily a network one but I'm not sure. Writing to USB2 sticks doesn't seem to cause the same problem.
So far I've tried:
I'm at a bit of a loss now as to what's causing these system crashes so consistently. I'm just troubleshooting with a lot of guesswork here and although there are lots of reports I've found about Windows 8/8.1 problems and USB3, I can't find anywhere a solution that explains why this might be happening or a potential solution.
I haven't yet tried installing Win7 and trying that but other than that I'm pretty much out of options. In any case I don't want to go back to Win7. Is there anywhere else I can check that might have recorded or point to the problem when the system freezes - somewhere other than Event Viewer? Any other known issues/solutions?
Any help or ideas would be very much appreciated.