Has anyone else seen this issue, when I have Workstation running and minimized and I plug a USB drive into my host, a second or two later, my host HDD starts thrashing, VMWare becomes unresponsive and basically crashes and I have to kill it from Task Manager to get access to my host again. Very frustrating.
Any tips on how to fix this or try to troubleshoot it appreciated.
-G
What version of Workstation here? Version of Windows? Does this happen with any USB drive or only a specific one?
Sorry dropped off this for a while. Daphnissov, thanks for replying and hopefully you're still around to assist.
It's VMWare Workstation 12.5.9 build-7535481. My host is a Dell Precision 7510 Running Windows 7 - 32GB RAM. And this happens with multiple USB drives, had it with a 2TB HDD, and a 32GB flash drive. I've found if I'm patient and wait about 2-3 minutes, then it finishes whatever thrashing its doing and starts responding again. And I know its not the drives or the OS, since if I exit out of Workstation, then I can plug these in and use them fine. No thrashing. It's just when VM Workstation is running. I have Workstation minimized when i do this, so its connecting the device to the host. In fact I can see the drive appear in Windows Explorer on the host just before the thrashing starts.
And assistance appreciated.
-G
Meant "Any assistance appreciated"
I had a similar problem using Workstation 15. I suspect it may be related to using a Windows 10 host as I have recently noticed a lot more 'Green bar of Death' instances. I've been forced to take two measures which seem to ameliorate the problem a little, it is however still bad.
a) WS 15 offers an option to always first connect to the Windows host - take this option if available
b) Fix the Green Ribbon of death' by optimising all the folders for 'General Content' Registry fix here:
Folder Template - Default - Windows 7 Help Forums
It is possible that my Ryzen cpu may add to the problem - but I'm not sure about that aspect!
I have also disabled Windows Search just in case!
[Additional Comment]
I thought that I had addressed most of the issues until I got a lock-up late yesterday. This had all the signs of it being some form of a race condition involving Windows File Explorer - possibly in the area of shadow copies. I know that the Acronis Backup system does not play nicely with VMware so I removed it, and today USB performance is back to the snappy state of yesteryear. I suggest you look at running software and selectively disable any that use shadow copies until you identify the bad actor.
I should add, iMicrosoft suggest the old tried and tested SFC /ScanNow and DISM routes to make sure that you have no problematic OS corruption.