Sleep timer does not work any more

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

WD My Book 1230 2TB. I have two of these and neither one will go to sleep after not being used. I have gone through the drive utilities and all is OK. I also reinstalled the WES driver and checked the MS drivers in the Device Manager all is well there also.

This is important to me as I want the drives to be off for security reasons but want to back up every night with Macrium Reflect. And yes I do use WD Smartware also.
Any ideas?

2

I’d recommend disabling all backup applications and system schedules for testing purposes since 2 drives are having the same problem. As long as any process in your system attempts to access/use/scan the drive, the sleep timer will continue to reset.

3

Thanks for the idea. It is helpful.
Please understand that although I have not replied right away that I am very interested in solving this problem. I have been swamped with small problems that have keep me busy.

Long story short, I shut off “File History”.to no effect.
BUT…WDBackupEngine.exe *32 is running continuously using 13% of my CPU and about 80K of my memory. this doesn’t seem right.

Spring ’16 build
Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 MoBo
Cooler Master HAF series RC-932-KKN5 Case
GTX-970 Graphics card
Cooler Master RS 750 Power Supply
Intel Core i7- 6700K CPU 8M 4.0 Ghz CPU
1 Tetra Seagate ST1000DX001-1NS162
GSKILL Ripjaws 16GB DDR4 Memory
Lite-on DVD/CD Burner
Cooler Master 120mm CPU Cooler
SAMSUNG 850 PRO 2.5" 256GB SSD

4

SmartWare does use resources continuously because it is constantly looking for changes to your files.

5

Thank you…While studying all the WD programs in detail I noticed that WD Smartware could be set to use a schedule so I set it to use a schedule but this did not help so I removed WD Smartware with Revo uninstaller as Revo will remove all traces even those in the registry. The drives still do not go to sleep. The last couple days I have been ;looking at the Task Master and another program to try and find out what is keeping the external HD’s from sleeping and have so far failed to find the problem. Today I went to the Task Scheduler to be sure nothing was scheduled and all there seems OK.

I have; “WD Driver Utilities”, “WD Quickview”, and “WD Smartware Installer” installed now. If I cannot find the problem soon I am thinking of uninstalling all WD stuff and reinstalling everything.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

6

You’ve removed everything WD that should be reading/writing to the drive. if you still think something is accessing the device, something else on the computer is scanning it. Things like Anti-Virus applications are the most common culprit, but it could literally be almost anything - even malware.

7

Many many thanks, although I am now sure to get a big headache…lol.
Meanwhile of to buy some 256GB USB3’s so as to have a safe backup until I
solve the problem.