Most of the cases formatting is not necessary with a NEW drive IMO. USB, Western Digital and windows 10 sometimes are troublesome. With older WD USB stuff i needed WD's SES drivers BTW.

Also check for your latest Chipset drives for your mainboard. If you have a separate USB (3.0) controller card, check for it's latest drivers. I found especially that even USB-Audio can be influenced (dropouts) by the Graphics card drivers from AMD-RADEON. Furthermore for USB, check that the computer cannot switch off the connected USB, click right click on every HUB and check power management, and switch off selective suspend in power management. See pictures below.

BTW a higher drive letter defined is good advice, and you could use TeraCopy or FastCopy to copy faster, and i found the verify options there very useful. With both on my system with USB 3.0 copying can be up to 100 MB/s sometimes. F

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USB settings.jpg (87.41 KB, 144 downloads)
USB selective suspend.jpg (124.16 KB, 144 downloads)