Got rid of 750 tabs and updated Windows and found out that my USB disks seemed to break down in unison, but I have seen this behavior before and yup, it was just Windows that sneakily updated to the latest the drivers for the USB card. Oh Windows, the usb controller is a VIA chipset, you can't just update VIA products to better drivers like that. The drivers needs to be a very specific and years old version intended for Win7 in .cat/.inf format only, carefully sourced from angry users at Windows forums I've never heard of, then they need to be installed manually and forcefully, otherwise things won't work right.