WD Drive Manager is causing ping spikes on LAN connection

WD Software & Mobile Apps WD Software
1

Dear WD,

After 3 days of work I finally found out what was causing ping spikes on my Desktop PC. During gaming i noticed a lot of lag. So i installed the application Multiping to track my ping. I noticed it could spike up to 1100ms. 

This is when my investigation started. I first tried the obvious: testing ping between PC and router, between router and ISP, between different laptops and router/ISP. Soon i found out that it had to do something with my PC. The reason how i know it had to do with this is because i connected the LAN cable from my PC in to my laptop; there was no issue.

Second step was to find out what is causing the problem on my PC. After doing a lot of research on the internet i found one solution that helped me a lot. It gave the advice to start my PC into Safe Mode with Network Prompt. After this Multiping showed no ping issues. Meaning that the issue had nothing to due with my Windows Services/Registry/files. It had to do with a third party app.

After scanning my PC with AVG and CCleaner i couldn’t find any corrupted files. Then i found an article about performing a clean boot (meaning no third party app is allowed to start with windows unless you’ve checkmarked it). 

In the “System Configuration” of Windows you can enable or disable all third party services. I disabled all services and all start up programs. Upon the next boot up: no ping spikes. 

So I started to enable services step by step. Until I encoutered the WD Drive Manager Service. I performed multiple tests and everytime that service was enabled i encoutered ping spikes of 700-1100ms. 

Now i’ve updated the WD Quick View today, but this didn’t solve the problem. I currently have WD Drive Manager disabled and WD Quick View disabled on start up. So the issue is currently solved, but i still wanted you to let you know i have this problem.

I actually found one other person encountering the exact same problem a little bit more than a year ago:  WD Drive Manager LAN problems

I added some pictures to let you show that WD Drive Manager is causing this problem. Below as well my WD devices and PC info.

Thank you! And for everyone who things to have the same problem i followed the following steps:

  1. Install MultiPing to monitor your ping

        a. Websites i pinged were: www.google.com, router IP (default: 192.168.1.1), ISP website ( www.ziggo.nl for me), 8.8.8.8 (Google Public DNS), 4.2.2.2 (found this one somewhere online).

  1. Determine if other devices have the same problem (could be a ISP or router problem

  2. Determine if 3rd party or Windows Services is creating the problem by booting in Safe Mode with Network Prompt.

         a. If you still encounter the problem in safe mode i must be a problem with the Windows setting. Not sure if i can help you here, but most likely the best would be to re-install windows. Or try to look online for settings you can change within Windows (like re-installing LAN card drivers.

  1. If a third party app is the issue, perform a clean boot:  How to perform a clean boot in Windows

  2. Try to enable services step by step, i tried a couple at the same time (for example, all services with an A together, then with a B, etc.)

Western Digital Devices:

WD My Passport 2TB (083C USB)

WDC WD30EFRX-68AX9N0

WDC WD6400AAKS-22A7B0

System:

Windows 8.1 Pro N 64bit

XFX Graphics card PCI-e Radeon HD7850 Core 2GB 2xDVI/HDMI/DP

Kingston 2x4GB, DDR3, PC12800, CL9, HyperX, XMP

AMD Athlon II X4 750K 3.40GHz 4MB FM2 Box

Gelid Solutions Processor Cooler Tranquillo Rev.2

Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-D3H AMD A85X, SATA600 RAID

Samsung SSD 2.5", 250GB, SATA600, 840 Series

Thermaltake Power Supply Smart M550W 550W

Pictures

WD Drive Manager Disabled:

WD Drive Manager Disabled
WD Drive Manager Disabled1680×1080 110 KB

To enlarge: Right click → Open image in new tab

On the left of the graphs you can see the bounds of latency, which is 0 to 100 . The only IP coming above 100 is Twitter.com (not sure why, but this one always has a ping of 120-140, on all other devices i tested). But none of the other IP’s are coming above 100 in the last hour.

WD Drive Manager Enabled:

WD Drive Manager Enabled
WD Drive Manager Enabled1678×1080 120 KB

 To enlarge: Right click → Open image in new tab

I turned on the WD Drive Manager for an hour to show you the ping spikes. On the left you can now see the graphs bounds are from 0 - 510

Also the Latency in the top right corner is showing pings up in the 800-1000ms

If anyone else is encoutering this problem please send a PM to me

WD Quick View Version:

WD Quick View Version

2

Hello there and welcome to the WD community.

We have passed this along to support

3

Hi,

Thank you! I’ve seen his email and were discussing the issue. I will come back to this thread after we found the pernament solution

4

We have been emailing back and forth. The technical department tried to replicate the problem but was unable to. They are guessing that it will have something to do with other installed software that is causing a conflict. 

Since i don’t had any problems when Quick View was disabled they recommended to keep it like this. They have forwarded the issue to the development team (for next releases of the software). Maybe it will be solved in the future.

In case you need help to disable the Quick View app feel free to contact me!

5

I’ve been having lag spikes for a few months since I got a new My Passport Ultra 1T external drive. The gaming community was struggling with issues on the main server end. Complaints died down when they made improvements, but mine didn’t get much better. I was finally fed up with the spikes and starting working on the problem using some of the methods you described.

Using ping in a command prompt, i pinged the router and watched the Resource Monitor where you can see what is using network traffic and how much. It was the WD Drive Manager.

I disabled all WD software and services from msconfig and disconnected the drive.

The lag spikes are gone.

This solves my spke problems, but now I don’t have a working drive.

6

I still have my WD My Passport 2TB connected to my PC. It still works fine even with the WD Quick View and Drive Manager disabled and i don’t have any spikes when my hard drive is connected. Do you have to disconnect your drive to make the ping spikes disappear? Or can you have it connected but just disabled all the services?

7

I was so happy to get rid of the lag spikes for my games that I just disabled and removed it all. For me it was more important than having the drive. Tomorrow or next weekend I’ll try to see how much I can get working again without the spikes.

I’ll try what you posted and see if it works for me without the issues.

8

I have confirmed the drive still works when connected to my computer with all the WD services and start-up programs disabled and I don’t get lag spikes. The problem was clearly just the WD Drive Manager service. Unfortunatly, it appears that WD Drive Manager needs to be running to have the other features working, like the autoback-up, which was a nice feature.

9

Thank you for confirming this. Hopefully WD will look in to this if more people are having the problem. I personally don’t use any feautures of WD Quick View so didn’t notice any changes.

I’m not sure what the exact function of auto-backup was, but i do know some programs that automaticly back up certain folders to your external harddrive (like a mirror). I’m using CrashPlan to back-up my files to the cloud. But it also has the option to backup selected folders to another hard drive. It does encrypt the files so you can’t use them directly. You can only restore the files using CrashPlan. Cloud storage of CrashPlan costs money, but i think the storage to another local hard drive is free. 

This is just something i use, but there most be more software programs that auto-backup certain folders on your internal drive to another local drive.

10

Hello, thank you for your posts - it helped me confirm I am also having exact same issue with WDDriverService.exe - as soon as i kill that process, the high latency pings go away - it was making online games on any pc on my network unplayable. Amazing that this one driver can cripple the whole home network!

Sadly, it seems no resolution for this was posted by WD…I am using a WD My Book 3TB external drive for automatic backups…i doubt it will work for auto backup without this driver, so it seems i may have to get rid of the drive or uninstall the WD software and find another auto backup solution.

I’ve always had good luck with WD drives in the past, so i’m really surprised by this lack of resolution.

Anyone at WD able to chime in on this issue?

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