WD My Passport Ultra interferes with my wireless connection

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I have a 2TB My Passport Ultra drive (not wireless enabled) that I connect to my PC via USB3 port.
The drive is working fine with this PC, as well as with other devices such as WD TV Player.
But the problem is that as soon as I connect the drive to the USB port, my wireless connection to my home router starts lagging badly. I can see ping timeouts, the transfer speeds drops almost to zero, sometimes wireless connection to the router is dropped, re-created, dropped again.
As soon as I disconnect the drive from the USB port, the wifi connection is restored, timeouts gone, speed is as usual.

My main wireless device is D-link PCI card with external antenna. I also tried a USB wifi dongle which showed exactly same behaviour - the wireless starts lagging when drive is connected, and gets restored when drive is disconnected.

What could be causing this, and how to fix this? I hate to disconnect the drive to be able to use internet.

2

Hello,

This is not very usual that a local drive stars creating a conflict with your network.

Please check if you have a backup software that might be trying to create a backup over the network.

Also check if some one is trying to access the drive over the network or sharing some files from the Passport.

3

Thanks and sorry for my late reply.

Nobody is accessing this USB drive but me. This is a home network, there is no network backup or anyother network clients that could possibly access this drive. The computer is Windows 7, up-to-date, virus-free and with minimum software installed.

Also the problem is not about whether the drive is accessed or not, it’s about whether drive is mounted or not.
As soon as I connect the drive and it is recognized, lagging starts. The same very second.
As soon as I disconnect the drive or dismount/eject it (even without disconnecting the cable), lagging stops.
The lagging is really bad and makes internet access almost impossible.

4

I did some additional research.

The above behavior is with third-party 1.8m USB3 Type A to micro-B cable I purchased, because the original cable is too short.
With the original 40cm cable, the symptoms are much lighter. With WD drive connected, the wireless connection seems unaffected in the beginning, and only starts lagging under load. For example, running speedtest.net yields 0.5Mbps (I have 10Mbps connection). The ping times are sky high at the time of test, but at least I can use the internet.

With 1.8m cable, the wifi link lags immediately when drive is connected. The ping will time out every now and then, and the link is unusable.

Plugging the drive into an USB 2.0 port solves all interference problems, but degrades the speed of data transfer.

What can I do to solve this?

5

Hello, it happens to me exactly the same thing that wapper_vapper mentions.
Does someone know how to solve this problem?
Thanks

6

It appears the WD support person earlier did not know the reason for this problem. This earlier post explains what is going on. It has to do with RF interference at the USB port and is described in an Intel White Paper which is linked to within the link below: