Software Update - WD SmartWare Windows Version 1.5.1.6 (8/16/11)

Wow, so you know about the problem.  I bet you can imagine the hours it took me to restore my system after having the C drive eaten by what is clearly a bug.  Why would Smartware leave these files?  Why should I have to clean temp files once a week to keep my system running?

Amazing.

Hey everybody, as your C drive is being eaten make sure you run CCleaner once a a week.  I just can’t believe it.

There are several of us who have mentioned this before, and there are several threads in this forum that mention this bug (and other problems). Its absolutely amazing to me that a company like WDT would release software with such major flaws. Not deleting one’s own temp files, is “programming 101” kind of nonsense. It’s been several months since anyone at WDT claimed they were “working on a solution” for the temp files. Silence from them on the other problems (high CPU usage, inaccurate “progress gauges”, never ending “categorizing” of files).

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Exactly.  Being new to this forum I entered my comments in an effort to help others.  Running the CPU at 100% is a serious issue but no where near as serious as watching your C drive get eaten.  As I moved more and more files from my C drive to my e drive (trying to free up space) the temp files became even hungrier.  I guess more “analysis.”

When the C drive had zero free space programs began to crash and files became corrupted.  I lost a lot of time.

This is now a “Known issue.”  I can clearly and easily demonstrate this bug.  And yes, cleaning up temp files is programming 101.

What’s even more sad, is that WD apparently doesn’t understand how severe these problems are (or they don’t see them on their internal development machines). WD is taking the stance that “well yeah, its shadowing software, so it should consume more CPU than backup software, because it has to constantly look for changes that may need to be backed up”.

To which, I say baloney!

(1) If my bloatware Symantec can perform a full system scan, using less resources, and if Window’s own file searching capability can use less resources when searching an entire disk file structure, then certainly WD’s software can do the same.

(2) With all those HUGE temp files, its no wonder the system is crawling so slowly, as WD’s software bangs away at those files.

(3) Speaking of all those huge temp files, what on earth can they be storing in them, that consumes so much space? To track files that need to be backed up, one only needs to know its pathname, the date/time it was last modified and the date/time it was last backed up. Judging by the number and size of all the temp files it creates on my system, there is a lot more waste (probably SQL overhead).

(4) Even when someone selects the “back up only the folders and files I’ve selected” method, this software consumes most of the PC’s capability. I’ll bet they’re still “Categorizing” the entire disk, instead of only looking at the folders/files I’ve asked it to watch over.

You should have seen their last release of their software… it was all that PLUS it consumed a LOT more resident memory, and would hardly release the CPU if other apps needed it. At least the 3 or 4 applications that make up this software (more overhead!) doesn’t consume as much memory as it once did.

The temp file thing just bothers me to no end. I am a software developer, and if I released software with such a blatant error, the fix would have been easy, and the patch would have been released the very next day.

As you said, "This is now a “Known issue”, but unfortunately, it only appears to be known by us users on this forum. Apparently WD doesn’t (or rarely) participates in their own forum, and I assume they don’t treat these complaints as problems that actually need to be addressed.

WD WHY ARE YOU STILL SILENT ON THESE ISSUES?

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BRAVO!!  I think upper managment needs to be made aware of these issues.  This is probably not the right place.  I suffered through the temp file disaster thinking it was something that no one knew about.  I wanted to help other users and alert WD so they could fix it quickly.

Not deleting temp files is a tip of the iceberg situation.  If they can’t take care of their temp files there is a whole lot more beneath the water that cannot be seen.

I have told people how to delete these temp files.  The program that helped me is WinDirStat.  With it I was immediately able to discover these temp files on my C drive.  Remember, I had no warning.  Just a drive being eaten alive.

I don’t need this software.  It came with the drive.  I thought I would try it.  I am sure I have lost at least 6 or 8 hours because of this bug.

Done.

BBBBBrandon wrote:


SLYPHNIER wrote:

yes, i mean etilsq_* on temporary folder that keep growing 


We haven’t changed anything that would have made this go away.  There is a new database generated everytime the WDFME starts.

Unfortunately resolving this issue from a code stand-point isn’t as easy as the software deleting temp files. I wanted to post a quick update though that we will be making some back-end changes in a future release to resolve this issue. 

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This software uses an unacceptable level of memory resources.  It has taken up as much memory as it can, reducing my 8Gb system to an absolute crawl.  I regularly need to manually terminate all WD processes through Windows 7’s Resource Monitor to get my system make to a useable state.

I had bought the drive to allow continuous backing up of any changed files, so I had more up-to-date backups than my previous weekly backup routine; but given the about of time waste by my system being slowed by this software, I’m tempted to take the risk of out of date backups so that the rest of my time isn’t wasted so severely.

Any chance WD is going to resolve this problem?

Just to show how much memory the WD software is using, here it is using up almost 6Gb; only restricted by other programs actually doing something productive with their memory usage.

I kept noticing my CPU usage was way up in Task Manager and finally figured it out that it’s the Smartware bloatware.  WDFME.exe keeps pounding the CPU and adds 1 gig of memory usage.  I have a I7 and 6 gig of RAM (64 bit) but my preference would be to use it for applications not backup software.  WDFME.exe is the number 1 cpu user and number 1 memory user on my laptop.  I simply have shut it down in startup so my CPU doesn’t get cooked.  I have set both WD services to manual startup.  When turned off the CPU sits at 1% usage.

Bill

Soooo glad (and sorry) to hear I’m not alone in this problem.  I finally uninstalled SmartWare and will wait for a better version.  The problem is 2 months old, correlating nicely with the last update.  Not only was the backup shadow using 98% of my functional capacity, it wouldn’t let the drive shut off after a backup.  That’s just annoying.  I can’t leave the unit plugged into the USB as it screws with my boot sequence and nothing I’ve done has corrected that, so I have to unplug the drive between backups.  How irritating to have to wait an hour and still use a forced shutdown!  I’m not as tech-savvy as most here, but I know enough to understand when a program is creating more problems than it’s solving.

Meanwhile, the Passport works nicely as a backup hard drive and it’s already got two full copies of my drive on it, so I’ll use it to back up specific folders while I wait for you guys to fix the problem.   At least I can access the files on the Passport, which puts it ahead of my last two backup externals that did something bizarre to the files making them inaccessible for reloading after a crash.  Der…really?  Isn’t that the point?

I have My Book Essential 2 TB I just got from Office Depot, It did a full back up but  when I’m directed to update Smartware 1.4.5.2  to 1.5.1.6  I get this dialogue box: “WD SmartWare cannot be installed. Installation unseccessful (Error Code: 1603). Please try again or contact WD support for assistance.” 

WD Email tech told me to uninstall the old Smartware which failed since “The setup was unable to close all requested applications, etc.”) altho I’d turned off anti-virus. Tech wrote me to update my firmware and when I tried to do that I was informed my firmware is  up to date.

I’ve read through all the comments, thanks everyone. I am hesitant to start whacking away at my Windows7 registry. I’m hesitant to simply delete all WD Smartware directories both on the “My Book” and my internal drive.

I started out happy to have everything backed up on “My Book” but as soon as I was forced to try updating Smartware this has turned into a nightmare. I hope Office Depot will take this product back.

WD must provide us with a simple user-friendly method to completely eliminate all vestiges of Smartware OR

this product, as pretty as it is, is cumbersome & useless. 

I’m open to a solution to this but I don’t see it.

Smartware is more like a virus than useful software: I can’t get rid of it!

i have just bought a new WD my passport essential usb3 and i tried to install the 1.5.1.6 software update instead of the original 1.4.5.5 that it came with. But on the new software it simpy does not work. You can see it but the software will simply not see the files on the computer or the WD disk. You just see 0 bytes on both sides. I tried to remove and reinstall but to no avain. With the original software it runs fine, but the back up is nowhere near as fast as the manual suggests for a usb2. I think that it actually runs slower than a usb1.1 . And my computer runs on widows 7, has the latest servicepacks and updates and has a 8gb Ram and an intel i7 processor, plus an  SSD.

Does anyone have the same problem as me?

Homer.

Hi Homer,

read the 7 pages of posts on this topic and look for other related themes on the community. You will see a lot of people are having problems with 1.5.1.6. I have no solutions for you and have big problems myself. If I find an answer then I will post it here.

John

thanks for the reply. I will keep n reading as it seems!

Homer

How can I remove WD Smartware from my computer? Wd I cause problems if I simply delete all directories?

Yes, it would cause problems if you just started deleting directories.  Go into Add/Remove programs (XP) and select it from the list, then click on Remove.  I would make sure the drive is not connected, and I would also put the program on pause, though you probably don’t need to do that.

Ok, I guess this is more of the same, but I figure the more people complain about this piece of junk software the better the chance they’ll actually fix it.

After installing smartware several months ago, my laptop has slowed to a crawl. I just checked, around half an hour after rebooting my machine and after the backup process finished, and WDFME.EXE deems it necessary to still use 71% of my CPU and over 300+ MB or Ram. Now I know that’s not nearly as bad as some other posters here but still. I run a database engine on this laptop and it doesn’t nearly consume as much as this program! It’s insane!

On top of that I strongly suspect that the blue screen of death that both my wife and I have been getting on our respective laptops is related to Smartware. My wife’s ICT department actually confirmed this and disabled the services to prevent it from happening (with some success…).

In other words, what [Deleted]  WD thinking! So many people complain, and nothing changes! I haven’t seen a software update in more than a month! I don’t want to remove the smartware as the auto backup was a big part of the decision to buy this drive, but if something doesn’t change soon I’ll vote with my feet. WD will lose another loyal, good customer to Seagate.

I called WD tech and with his help thru direct assist (that is, directly removing the smartware) my problem was and is solved. He was efficient and courteous. I should have called days ago. I’ll probably use the Windows7 backup program from now on . . . thanks WD tech.

larryg wrote:

I called WD tech and with his help thru direct assist (that is, directly removing the smartware) my problem was and is solved. He was efficient and courteous. I should have called days ago. I’ll probably use the Windows7 backup program from now on . . . thanks WD tech.

 

 

Larry, I am glad we were able to help you out.

I wanted to post an update here for everyone as there was a large amount of feedback due to a few problems.

There is quite a bit of feedback due to memory usage in some machines.  We are addressing this in a future release (not the next release due to such a major change).  This total overhual will drastically improve performance.

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However one problem remains: I need to remove the “unlock” feature. I made the mistake of setting up a password to unlock Mybook. 

Do I have to format the drive to get rid of the unlock/lock feature? I don’t need it at all. Almost all vestiges of Smartdrive have been removed by WD tech.

thanks,

larryg