Windows 8.1 external hard drive disconnecting

Have this problem on two late 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina (full spec) and late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina (also full spec), all now running Windows 8.1 Pro with the latest update.   Two machines were clean installs into new bootcamp partitions and one was an in-place update to an existing Windows 8.0 Pro install.
Issue Description
Updated bootcamp from Windows 8.0 Pro to Windows 8.1 Pro through the MS store last night.    Made sure to download the new, correct Bootcamp drivers for the 2012 Macbook (the drivers are different between the 2012 and 2013 models).
External USB drives now disconnect every 10-15 minutes.
I am using the High Performance power plan and in USB settings disabled USB selective suspend.   In Device Manager under USB Serial Bus Controllers double-clicked all USB root hubs and cleared the checkbox on the Power Management tab (so the computer is not allowed to turn off the device to save power).
Also tried removing the Quick Removal policy on the attached drive but Windows still disconnected the drive, even though a Windows Explorer window was open showing the root contents of the idle drive.
Contacted MS support and they won't support Windows on a bootcamp partition.
Out of ideas based on internet searching, sounds like it might be a driver issue in Bootcamp.
Installing KeepAliveHD from Codeplex to write a file to the external drives as a workround to the problem.

The issue appears to have been the StarTech USB 3.0 to 2." SATA enclosure with encryption.   (I say "appears" because anybody familiar with Murphy's Law knows that these drives will eventually disconnect once I click <Add Reply> to this thread. <g>)
The WD 4TB MyBook drives stayed connected for the entire weekend without issues.   A bare metal Samsung 840PRO SSD connected with a USB 3.0 to SATA 6G cable also had no problems.
To fix the problem I had to lookup the hardware ID of the device in Device Manager (the VID and the PID) and then create a new key under USBSTOR under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control.   For the new key I added a new 32-bit DWORD with a value of 400 (hex).   Disconnected and reconnected the drive and it hasn't disconnected since. Solution worked on all MBPr machines.
Interestingly there is a blog on MSDN that suggests the above-noted fix should not be required subsequent to a Windows update that was pushed on April 8, 2014 (all of our machines were fully-up-to date as of last Friday April 25, 2014 and they did need the fix).
The required registry key for the above-noted device enclosure (mfg PN S2510BU3PW) is 04C52028.

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This is a common issue with Advanced Format Disks that have a 4KB physical sector size, which may cause incompatibility issues with existing software (including operating systems and applications).
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helloangela wrote:
i use a Hitachi HTS545025B9A300 Media external hard drive and it is connected by 2 usb ports. it's driving me insane, and when it does so happen to behave and connect longer than 5 minutes, it takes me up to an hour to transfer something on my laptop from that range from about 600-800 MB. help!
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mr1213 wrote:
I have an external USB hard drive functioning for my Time Machine back-ups. I usually turn off my iMac by using the sleep function. Often, when I activate out of sleep, I get the error message that the hard drive was disconnected incorrectly (I assume this means not ejected properly). But I haven't disconnected the USB wire. I can't figure ot why I am getting this message so often.
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Windows 8.1 external hard drive disconnecting

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