djurny......thanks for your help but I decided to restart from scratch knowing the issue. Back up and running now. I set CPU Governor to "Performance".
I read and make some power management changes in Windows 10 (esp ACHI Power Management) to get max performance for SSD/HHDs file transfer and turned off any idling/power savings. I also wanted an option on this tweak to prevent data loss on power loss to hdparm.conf: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/01/disable-disk-caching-prevent-data-loss/
Z06Frank got a reaction from djurny in Helios64 - freeze whatever the kernel is.