Experiencing File Hash Failures on Windows 11 with SMB Shares?

That sounds troubling! Typically, those SMB features shouldn't alter the actual file contents. Have you tried copying one of the video files to a different location on the same drive just to see if the problem persists there? You mentioned issues with external shares and local drives—what about the same drive? Also, it’s concerning that the hashes are changing over time. Are you seeing these changing hashes from another computer when connected to the share?

I've dealt with similar issues on a couple of Windows 11 machines, and it drove me crazy for a while too. For me, it turned out to be Windows 11 being 'helpful' with SMB settings. After I disabled SMB Signing and Multichannel on my Windows 11 system, the hashes stopped changing. The Win10 setup was working seamlessly, which pointed to an issue with the client side settings. It might be worth checking your NIC drivers and disabling any real-time antivirus for testing, as outdated drivers with Windows 11 and SMB settings can create problems, especially with larger files.

Just to clarify, SMB Multichannel is turned on while SMB Signing is off on both the machines and the storage. We've had the system freshly installed last week, so all the latest updates are applied. The hashes initially match, but then fail after a short time. The process of generating these hashes is tied to XML files that should match when revalidated, but it's only the large video files that are consistently failing. What's even stranger is that smaller files like the XMLs and audio seem to validate fine. I've had multiple attempts showing the same wrong hash, but for some reason, on the fifth try, the wrong signature was different from the previous four. What's going on?

I've heard that some of the latest Windows Updates could mess up the SMB shares. You might want to look into whether your machine has the newest updates and if any have been reported to cause issues.