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I have 3 SSDs plugged into a PC. I use a SATA dock to control power to the drives. One drive (Drive #3) is always powered on, this is the "data drive". I use the dock to "dual boot" the system by powering down, then making sure either "Drive 1" or "Drive 2" is powered on - but never both at once. This works very well to switch between different system drives. I believe this is nearly the same thing as having 2 PCs and physically moving the "data drive" (drive #3) between PCs.

Unfortunately, this results in data corruption issues on drive #3 when large amounts of files are read/written. (Files are obviously missing, I run chkdsk and it finds and fixes errors). Is there a "safe" way to move hard drives between PCs or does Windows 10 not support this? The "data drive" is always formatted as NTFS and I have tried partitioning it as both "Basic" GPT and also Dynamic Disk, the problems persist no matter what.

The drive being 'shared' is 1TB in case that matters. As stated in the title, both "system drives" are Windows 10 and they are never both powered on at once. The system boots off of whichever "system drive" it finds at power on.

I have been building PCs for over 20 years and I thought moving a non-system drive that doesn't hold the OS between PCs is something that is OK to do. What am I missing here?

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  • Very similar symptom here: Moving a mSATA (Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA 1TB) from one Win10 to another Win10 machine. One is a AMD Ryzen 3700X, the other is some Core i5. The disk is connected to internal SATA ports. I always power off the machines before connecting or disconnecting the disk. I directly run a VM on the disk, vmware. The latest modified disk files have the highest risk of corruption. I even put two backup copies of the current disk file on the same SSD drive, but they might be corrupted and gone as well after a chkdsk. veeery straaaange... is the disk about to die?
    – leo
    Jun 16, 2020 at 22:16

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Disable "Fast Startup" option in Power Settings.

There is a strong indication that Fast Startup restores some state on the "non-removable" but reconnected disk, totally ignoring the fact that the disk had been used by another Windows 10 installation meanwhile.

From the reports, it looks like this does not only happen to "non-removable" disks like SATA connected disks, but also to external USB HDs.

Microsoft Forum, Windows 10 corrupted external USB Hard Drive
Windows 10 corrupting removable hard drives

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  • Amazing, I never thought I would get any leads on this. Thank you. Jul 14, 2020 at 21:16
  • Side note, I wonder if this would help. superuser.com/questions/833552/… Jul 14, 2020 at 21:21
  • Yes. I was able to corrupt my brand new Sandisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD at will, over and over. Turned off fast startup on both machines, same procedure produces no problems. Ironic that I was screwed by being so careful to shutdown the machines before removing the drive. If I had just yanked them out while the the O/S was still running I would have gotten less damage.
    – Ron Burk
    Nov 21, 2021 at 8:22

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