External computer storage file problem

[Bazzer]

I have been converting to digital and editing many Gb of old VHS and Hi8 videos. As well as them being a future digital record for Mrs B and I, the intention is to give to each of my daughters for their birthdays, a memory stick of videos of their younger days, now deceased family members etc.
An older 1Tb external hard drive is almost full with previous backups plus most of the unedited videos and I thought a second external storage would give me more "elbow room" for the file structures I want to put in place for the final videos. - The structure and to some extent the videos for each of my daughters would be different, and they would be different to the file structure and videos for our copies. Also having the additional storage may be handy in the future. So I bought a 3Tb SSD.
However, when I come to playback MP4 files from the SSD which have been copied to it, I get an error message.
This file isn’t playable. That might be because the file type is unsupported, the file extension is incorrect, or the file is corrupt.
I get the same message if I copy to the SSD, MP4 files from the external hard drive, a USB stick, or from the computer, despite the same MP4 files playing from the original location of external hard drive/USB stick/computer.
I have tried
reformatting the SSD,
changing the file system from exFAT to NTFS
switching the SSD between two laptops each running W10,
changing which of the USB 3.0 ports the SSD is connected,
updating the driver from Device Manager,
recording directly to the SSD and converting the mkv file to MP4 on the SSD,
but I still keep getting the same message.
The SSD appears to be making some change to the MP4 file, because if I copy the file from the SSD back to the external hard drive, etc., and then try to play it, an error message is generated. Similarly, my editing software Wondershare, produces an error message if I try to use it open a video file from the SSD. By contrast, if I copy a word document to the SSD, that will open normally from the SSD.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I may be doing wrong, or does it sound like a duff SSD?

 

[icowden]

Can you do some experiments with file sizes? It seems that small files are OK (e.g. the word document), but large not so.
You could try copying from the command prompt using a more robust copying method such as Robocopy and then verifying the files with the windows FCIV tool :-

From StackOverflow:-

You can read about the Windows FCIV tool here. That link will explain how to install the tool and also explain its usage. For your purpose, you can use the tool's recursive option and run these two commands:
fciv D:\Path\To\Source -r -xml db.xml
fciv -v -bp E:\Path\To\Destination -r -xml db.xml

Replace D:\Path\To\Source with the path of your source files and replace E:\Path\To\Destination with the path of the files that you copied.
The first command will create a database called "db.xml" in the folder where you ran the command. The second command will use that database to verify the copied files using the md5 hash checksum.
If all went well, you'll receive a message that says "All files verified successfully".

Microsoft have also released a tool called RichCopy which verifies the copy as it copies and runs from a GUI rather than the command prompt - so it's a bit easier to use - although many users report that it's quite buggy on newer systems. XXCOPY may also be worth a punt...

Another thing you could so is check your drive properties for both SSDs and see if you have any differences around file caching.

FWIW - when I googled a *lot* of people seem to have problems with external SSDs and video files.

 

[Bazzer]

Can you do some experiments with file sizes? It seems that small files are OK (e.g. the word document), but large not so.
You could try copying from the command prompt using a more robust copying method such as Robocopy and then verifying the files with the windows FCIV tool :-

From StackOverflow:-


Microsoft have also released a tool called RichCopy which verifies the copy as it copies and runs from a GUI rather than the command prompt - so it's a bit easier to use - although many users report that it's quite buggy on newer systems. XXCOPY may also be worth a punt...

Another thing you could so is check your drive properties for both SSDs and see if you have any differences around file caching.

FWIW - when I googled a *lot* of people seem to have problems with external SSDs and video files.

If I copy the file back to the source, I get an error message. I did look at doing that, because in the short term I could have put all of the video files on the SSD, used the storage to build the video structures and then moved each on to USB/external hard drive.
The size of the file doesn't seem to make any difference. I created a tiny 6.5Mb video file to see that would work any better than files in a 2Gb folder, but it didn't.
Thanks for the suggested alternatives for copying. I'll give them a try.

 

[markemark]

Does the ssd have any compression settings being applied when copying that is making the files unreadable?

 

[icowden]

If I copy the file back to the source, I get an error message.

I saw that - so that confirms that data is being lost / corrupted during the copy from source to the new SSD. All we have to figure out is why.
If you open my computer and right click on the drive then compare the drive properties, you may be able to see if anything is different around caching or compression on the new drive when compared with the old.

 

[Bazzer]

Thanks for the replies.
I've not found anything obvious, at least to me, which is causing the fault. No compression settings, etc.
We have been out for 3 hours or so this evening, so having a break from the latest hurdle to what originally started out as something my wife and daughters would appreciate, to a complete pain in the backside for me, has been welcome!
I can't help feeling the SSD is at fault. Before we went out, I looked at freeing up space on the external hard drive by transferring the photos stored on it. As a test using W10, I copied across to the SSD, half a dozen or so photos from the HDD expansion drive. All of the photos on the SSD would open, but the image on three of them was very poor and not to the same standard as the original.
As a last resort I have downloaded a 30 day trial version of Shadowmaker and am leaving it overnight to copy the folder which has all of the videos to the SSD. If it works, I can use it as a workaround to get me over my immediate difficulty. But I'll look get another Seagate external hard disk drive, just for photos and videos.